Re: [Gretl-devel] Standards for function package help
Am 22.08.2018 um 16:41 schrieb Allin Cottrell:
On Wed, 22 Aug 2018, Sven Schreiber wrote:
> Am 21.08.2018 um 22:47 schrieb Allin Cottrell:
>>
>> Any gfn-derived information presented by gretl itself can easily be
>> made "nicely formatted" -- at least if you think the help for the
>> built-in functions is nicely formatted ;-)
>>
> What do you mean with "presented by gretl"? Where does gretl present
> information on the gfns, apart from outputting the help text verbatim?
If you select a package in the function-package viewer window,
right-click and ...
Sorry, that was a misunderstanding, I knew that. I was still focussing
on the help text itself. But yes it's a good idea to output the
structured information on the function signatures etc.
Related thought: a standard way of documenting individual functions in
source code is via regimented comments -- the content of such comments
can be extracted and pretty-printed by a suitable module,
What comes immediately to
my mind are the so-called 'docstrings' in
Python, which are (triple-quoted, I believe) strings just below the
function signature. One of the nice things is that in some consoles you
can directly access those help strings - in ipython for example by doing
'myfunc?'. If at some point in the future in gretl (in the console) you
could directly access those strings also for loaded hansl functions that
would of course be great.
But in a sense it's a digression I believe. Earlier on the agenda (and
in this thread) is the issue of help texts in the packages and how to
format them, irrespective of the functions themselves.
thanks,
sven