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From: | John W. Eaton |
Subject: | Re: Special handling for "help" involving apostrophe? |
Date: | Fri, 21 Jul 2017 13:44:40 -0400 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/52.2.1 |
On 07/21/2017 04:33 AM, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
Just curious if anyone is interested in altering the interpretation of the "help" so that instead ofoctave:22> help ' parse error: syntax errorhelp '^ the result would be the same as from octave:22> help "'" -- ' Matrix transpose operator. For complex matrices, computes the [snip] See also: .', transpose.I don't think that is breaking anything by handling in a special way, and it makes it a little bit more convenient for someone who is searching for help on that operator.In a similar fashion, if the user is interested in the help for .' listed above, I doubt there is any use for this:octave:23> help .' ans = F o r h e l p [snip] so I wonder if that help syntax interpretation could be altered as well.
There is no special "help syntax". It's just a function like any other that can be called with the command syntax. The symbol "help" may also be a user-defined function or a variable, so you can't just do something different if the first word in the statement is 'help'. And since this syntax can occur in a function, I don't see how you can do context-dependent parsing when the statement must be analyzed before even knowing whether the symbol "help" will refer to the built-in help function or something else on the load path. And doing something different at the top-level command prompt from what happens in other contexts seems really bad to me.
But if someone sees a way to make this work that is not overly complicated and wants to propose a patch that doesn't break other things, then OK, we can review it. I just don't think there is a simple solution.
jwe
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