Re: Lack of Documentation for (ice-9 regex) in Guile 1.9.10

[Noah Lavine]

Hello,

The issue I had with finding documentation for regexes was that I
didn't think to guess where the documentation was in the manual, and I
didn't know about the info help commands. On the one hand, I realize
it's a small problem, because now that I know where it is, it's easy
for me to use the documentation. On the other hand, I think it's an
issue that other people might have, and therefore it would be worth
fixing.

If you look at the "Simple Data Types" section of the manual, regular
expressions are very different than the other things in the menu:
numbers, characters, strings, bytevectors, etc. The manual section
they are most similar to is the one on LALR(1) Parsing. I would put
the regular expressions bit in the main menu for the API, just above
LALR(1) Parsing, to make it easier to find.

Noah

On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 11:03 AM, Neil Jerram <address@hidden> wrote:
> Andy Wingo <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> On Thu 20 May 2010 03:36, Noah Lavine <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>>> I found the documentation in info - sorry for the confusion. It didn't
>>> occur to me that a regexp would be considered a "Simple Data Type".
>>
>> Interesting observation. Copying Neil, who's working on the manual :)
>
> Old email alert...
>
> As far as the manual is concerned, I don't see anything else that we
> could do.  As things stand, the index entries for `regex' and
> `string-match' go straight to the relevant doc, and if you do `i match',
> the third result is the doc for match objects.
>
> The online help - currently nothing at all - could be improved, though.
> We could address this particular case by cutting/pasting/editing from
> the manual text.  Or, we could do something more general: basically
> post-process the manual in some way so that it can provide online help
> strings.  Any thoughts on that?
>
> (To get this to work, we might need a commenting convention to indicate
> which module the following section of manual is covering.)
>
>      Neil
>