[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #50034] "help ./" causes some extraneous printout of path info

[Dan Sebald]

Follow-up Comment #7, bug #50034 (project octave):

OH, I see.  which() is the part that prints out info at the front of help
output:

octave:10> help which
'which' is a function from the file
/usr/local/share/octave/4.3.0+/m/help/which.m

OK, so my last comment is maybe more pertinent than I originally thought.  If
one were to do the following:


octave:11> sin = 1;
[all kinds of other code...]
octave:97> sin(0.4)
error: sin(0.4): subscripts must be either integers 1 to (2^31)-1 or logicals
[hey, what is wrong with sin(0.4)?!]
octave:97> help sin
'sin' is a variable

 -- sin (X)
     Compute the sine for each element of X in radians.

     See also: asin, sind, sinh.


It might be better to just stop with


octave:97> help sin
'sin' is a variable


and not print the help for the sin() function.  That way it would become
immediately clear what went wrong.

But, again, I gave a link to an alternate approach to solving this
inattentive-programmer issue that prints a over-shadow warning at the point of
the error message which would be far more helpful.

I was going to suggest on the mailing list that the first line of help:


octave:10> help which
'which' is a function from the file
/usr/local/share/octave/4.3.0+/m/help/which.m


be dropped, but I thought there'd be too much objection.  The "which" routine
is listed in "help help" see-also, so the user should be able to track down
any "duplicate function name in my path" problems at a reasonable rate.


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