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

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

[Noah Lavine]

I can't find documentation for the (ice-9 regex) module in Guile 1.9.10.

Specifically, I looked in the info pages and couldn't find anything on
it (or regular expressions in general).

Then I tried using the on-line documentation, but running `,describe
(@ (ice-9 regex) string-match)` produces `#f`. (`,describe
make-regexp` and `,describe regexp-exec` returned information, but
it's not useful unless you can find out what a match object is, which
is what lead me to this problem)

Thank you
Noah Lavine

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

[Noah Lavine]

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".

On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 4:58 PM, Noah Lavine <noah549@gmail.com> wrote:
> I can't find documentation for the (ice-9 regex) module in Guile 1.9.10.
>
> Specifically, I looked in the info pages and couldn't find anything on
> it (or regular expressions in general).
>
> Then I tried using the on-line documentation, but running `,describe
> (@ (ice-9 regex) string-match)` produces `#f`. (`,describe
> make-regexp` and `,describe regexp-exec` returned information, but
> it's not useful unless you can find out what a match object is, which
> is what lead me to this problem)
>
> Thank you
> Noah Lavine
>

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

[Andy Wingo]

On Thu 20 May 2010 03:36, Noah Lavine <noah549@gmail.com> 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 :)

Andy
-- 
http://wingolog.org/

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

[Neil Jerram]

On 21 May 2010 12:28, Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com> wrote:
> On Thu 20 May 2010 03:36, Noah Lavine <noah549@gmail.com> 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 :)

Indeed I am.  Yes, really :-)  Thanks for the CC, and sorry for recent
quietness.

Regards,
      Neil (in very hot Stockholm)

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

[Neil Jerram]

Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com> writes:

> On Thu 20 May 2010 03:36, Noah Lavine <noah549@gmail.com> 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

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 <neil@ossau.uklinux.net> wrote:
> Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com> writes:
>
>> On Thu 20 May 2010 03:36, Noah Lavine <noah549@gmail.com> 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
>

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

[Neil Jerram]

Noah Lavine <noah549@gmail.com> writes:

> 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.

Agreed, and I've just made this change.  Thanks for following up!

        Neil