Dear Maxima-team & users,
many Maxima-packages include documentation - but often only as a comment
in the sourcecode (and there is no convenient way to display it from maxima.
Octave(/Matlab) has a simple method for displaying help for
addon-packages: they parse comments and display it using a
help()-command
(http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/doc/interpreter/Comments-and-the-Help-System.html).
I have written a similar function for Maxima - you can find it at:
http://wolfgang.dautermann.at/maxima/help_package.mac
Feel free to include it in maxima, if you find it useful.
After loading the function with
load(help_package);
you can display the inline help with:
help_package(help_package);
(or display the author, license, references)
It should be very easy to enable documentation to existing packages just
by add some keywords to (often already existing) the comments:
/*
@HELP_PACKAGE(BEGIN)
Documentation what a package does, which functions are available, ...
@HELP_PACKAGE(END)
*/
Of course instead of "@HELP_PACKAGE(BEGIN)" one may use another "tag",
perhaps something XML-Like if desired:
<help-package> ... </help-package>
Best regards,
Wolfgang