Re: [Haskell-cafe] Information given by :info (Was: Some randomnewbie questions)

On Tue, Jan 11, 2005 at 12:21:35PM -0000, Simon Marlow wrote:

On 10 January 2005 10:26, Sebastian Sylvan wrote:

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On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 10:30:46 +0100 (MEZ), Henning Thielemann wrote:

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What I also would like to see is the Haddock documentation string of a function printed by ":info" or some other command.

SWI Prolog has a predicate, "apropos" of arity 1. When appropos(xxx) is invoked from the interactive console (which is comparable to the HUGS of GHCi console), a new process is started in a window. The window has two panes one with a table of contents tree for the manual, one with brief descriptions of the predicate xxx. There is also an entry box for a new search, and a menu. It seems that it wouldn't be too hard to put together something similar that would work from either the HUGS or GHCi console. It would be too large a project of me at the moment :-). SWI Prolog uses XPCE, which is distributed with SWI Prolog, for the GUI. Best, John Velman

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Now _that_ would be truly useful.

It's not perfect, but it's better than nothing:

:def doc (\s -> let (rvar,rmod) = break (=='.') (reverse s); var = reverse rvar in System.Cmd.system ("mozilla http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base/" ++ reverse rmod ++ "html#" ++ (if (Data.Char.isUpper (head var)) then "t:" else "v:") ++ var) >> return "")

eg.

Prelude> :doc Prelude.head

You have to use a qualified name, it only works in package base, and you can't look up data constructors. Any hackers out there want to try lifting these restrictions?

Cheers, Simon _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe