Re: Improved help from minibuffer prompts

[Juanma Barranquero <lektu@mi.madritel.es>]

On 30 Apr 2004 11:57:41 -0400, Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:

> > Please, try this one instead.  It's a bit less elegant because of the
> > support for CL-style optional arguments, but it works in all tests cases
> > I've tried.
> 
> Please try to use help-split-fundoc.

I initially tried that, and ended having to patch describe-function
(and/or describe-function-1), help-split-fundoc and
help-add-fundoc-usage. The result wasn't pretty.

What I'm doing now, postprocessing the *Help* buffer after most of the
describe-function machinery has already run, is way easier and has the
added benefit that it almost doesn't touch what's already that.

> ctually you don't even need to do that because if you call your function from
> describe-function-1, the usage/arglist is already available separately from
> the docstring.

Yeah, but splitting usage from arglist is not a problem currently. The
problem I talked above is parsing things like the docstring for

 (defun* test (&optional (a 1))
   "Add 1 to A."
   (1+ a))

and, as far as I can see, the only point where the existing code would
help is in help-add-fundoc-usage, which does not return a string, but a
list, so adding highlighting information to it is messy (not to mention
hackish).

So, I'm not sure what benefit would it be (but I'm perhaps
misunderstanding you). Could you please elaborate?

Thanks,

                                                           /L/e/k/t/u