Re: inputParser documentation

[Juan Pablo Carbajal]

On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 11:35 PM, Rik <address@hidden> wrote:

On 03/18/2015 12:30 PM, Juan Pablo Carbajal wrote:

On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 7:08 PM, Rik <address@hidden> wrote:

On 03/18/2015 09:00 AM, address@hidden wrote:

Subject:

inputParser documentation in 4.0

From:

Juan Pablo Carbajal <address@hidden>

Date:

03/18/2015 02:06 AM

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Maintainers GNU Octave <address@hidden>

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Hi,

Carnë already mentioned that "help inputParser" doesn't work correctly.
However the help for the constructor appears in the manual.

I wonder if this is also related to the behavior of which()?

octave:1> which inputParser
'inputParser' is a built-in function
octave:2> which sin
'sin' is a built-in function from the file libinterp/corefcn/mappers.cc
octave:3> which inputParser.m
'inputParser.m' is the file /home/rik/wip/Projects_Mine/octave-dev/scripts/general/inputParser.m
octave:4> which sind
'sind' is a function from the file /home/rik/wip/Projects_Mine/octave-dev/scripts/elfun/sind.m

The first line does not look correct.

Where in the manual is the help for the methods?
The see aslo section should include links to those.

I don't think we have a solution yet for classdef files and documentation.  Previously, every m-file had a single texinfo block at the top that was parsed.  If you were using the old class syntax, then every method was also it's own m-file in a @classname directory.  This is how the @ftp class works and if you look at system.txi there is a DOCSTRING entry for each m-file.  We might not figure a solution to this before the 4.0 release.

--Rik

Will we have "undocumented" documented functionality? documentation that can only be accessed through the source code?

So to read the help one should do type <file>?

Is there no way to getting this help, at least in to the online manual?

I find this a rather serious problem.

Juan,

It's worse than just inputParser.  There is no documentation at all for the new classdef syntax, despite the fact that it appears to work quite well.  One possibly saving grace is that people who are using classdef with Matlab already know the syntax.  But anyone just starting out will have to look for classdef tutorials on the web.

I still think the problem is related to the fact that which() is misinterpreting the file type for inputParser.  It reports a built-in function which would normally have its documentation in a .cc file, but of course this is a function from an m-file so Octave should be looking there for documentation.  The function call

get_help_text ("inputParser")

returns an empty string ("") which is the proximate cause of the problem.

--Rik

Ok, thanks for the ideas. I will see if I can pin the problem down specifically.