A smallish proposal about help



On 2/10/07, Alasdair McAndrew <amca01 at gmail.com> wrote:

> If I want to find out about the mod function (for example) I type "? mod" or
> "describe(mod)" and I'm presented with a list of 19 items (all including the
> string "mod") to choose from.  I think there should be a way of going to the
> help for mod directly.  As I see it, "describe(mod)" or "? mod" should do
> just that, and the current behaviour of describe should be relegated to a
> function called, say, "lookfor" (which is used by Matlab).

In Maxima 5.11.0 there is a new feature describe(foo, exact)
(with the shorthand ?!) which prints only the info about foo.

Maybe ? should act like ?!, and invent a different notation (say ??)
for inexact search. Comments?

best,
Robert