Function Documentation



On 08/14/2013 02:32 AM, Daniel Steinberg wrote:
>  In Maxima, the describe function can get documentation for some 
function. For example, "describe(abs)" returns documentation on the abs 
function. Is there any way to define documentation for user-defined 
functions? For example, if I have a function "foo", is there any way to 
define a doc string such that describe(foo) would return that string?
>

1) I wrote something that allows ? and ?? to query various databases,
not just the built-in database. I wrote two or three documentation
systems that hook into it. Here are some of the functions for using
the systems:

http://www.johnlapeyre.com/thirdparty.html#htoc38

The easiest to use system has an interface with functions
(at the bottom of the list above) named 'simple_doc_...'.

This html page was generated by the function 'print_sections_latex',
which uses a database that is generated, in part, automatically from
the function definitions.

The code is available at:
https://github.com/jlapeyre/mext
It used to work on windows and six lisp/linux platforms.
But I have not compiled it with a recent version of maxima.

2) Leo Butler also wrote some code for user documentation:

http://sourceforge.net/apps/phpbb/maxima/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2&sid=c630ba27131f9f0299c6f31fa0c90319

-- John