On 5/31/09, Sheldon Newhouse <sen1 at math.msu.edu> wrote:
> Is there a routine analogous to the ? or ?? for user defined routines.
Not at present.
> Doing the 'functions' command is not very helpful since it lists all the
> functions and it is hard to find the name of one particular function.
Well, apropos(foo) finds variables and functions which
begin with foo, maybe that helps.
About making user-defined documentation known to the help
system, at present all documented items are stored in a lookup
table. The item name is the key and information about how to
obtain the documentation text is the value. The info about how to
get the text comprises a file name, byte offset, and number of
characters to read. I guess to accomodate user documentation
we could have, in addition, a how-to-get-it description which just
stores the user-defined text itself. To make that work, the code
in src/cl-info.lisp would have to look for the 2 different kinds of
descriptions. A built-in function, say define_documentation,
could put user defined text into the lookup table.
It wouldn't be much work, I guess it's a question of finding the
time to do it ... I'll put it on my to-do list. Of course if someone
else wants to take on the task, I probably wouldn't stop them.
best
Robert Dodier