On 12/9/10, Raymond Toy <toy.raymond at gmail.com> wrote:
> This is interesting. I had thought about reinstating the old cl-info
> code that groveled the maxima.info file to get the tags and
> everything. And the character offsets there would have worked just
> fine if we read in the whole info file (only takes a 10 ms on a slow 750
> MHz machine with cmucl) and extracted the data using the character offset.
The old regex search on maxima.info was slower in GCL than
other Lisps, as I recall. It was really unworkably slow -- I seem
to recall waiting a long time (like 20 seconds) to get help text.
So instead of getting a faster computer, I rewrote the info stuff.
Speed aside, building an index just seems like a conceptually
better (simpler & more powerful) way to handle the info stuff.
Also the info index stuff fixed some bugs in the help system.
I guess I don't see the point of refixing them.
I recommend against reverting to the old regex searches.
FWIW
Robert Dodier