2017/04/05

Another little improvement of online doc

Here's another little feature to be in 0.9.6. You can search info entries using regexp.

gosh> ,i #/^symbol-/
symbol->string           Symbols:62
symbol-append            Symbols:96
symbol-hash              Hashing:154
symbol-interned?         Symbols:54
symbol-sans-prefix       Symbols:87

Since gauche.interactive.info module builds the table from entry names to locations in info documents, it's just easy to pick entry names that matches the given regexp.

This raises an interesting question: We already have apropos which can search symbols. What's the difference?

On systems such as CL or Clojure, where docstring is tied to symbols, it's reasonable to let apropos for searching, and documentation/doc for retrieving the actual document.

In Gauche, we chose not to adopt docstring convention; instead, we provide a way to lookup separately provided document. This allows you to browse the document of symbols that are not loaded into the current repl, which is handy, since often you need to read doc before finding which module to import.

We can consider apropos more as an introspection tool into the current running process. With that view, there could be some options to enhance apropos---e.g. showing visibility of each binding from the current module, and if it's visible, why (e.g. this is visible because the current module imports this module which inherits this module, etc.)

Tags: Documentation, repl