[plt-scheme] Re: Some sort of documentation tool from the toplevel?

Do consider using keywords and hdindex files. At the risk of sounding
silly, look them up in help desk. :)

Robby

At Wed, 6 Jul 2005 16:29:05 -0700 (PDT), Danny Yoo wrote:
>   For list-related administrative tasks:
>   http://list.cs.brown.edu/mailman/listinfo/plt-scheme
> 
> 
> 
> > I'd like to write a tool that'll help me get quick documentation strings
> > for an arbitrary mzscheme primitive function.  For the life of me, I
> > can't remember all of the mzscheme primitives, nor what order the
> > arguments have to be in, nor what optional arguments they accept.
> 
> 
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I've written something that is starting to work, although it is hacky as
> heck, and totally not right yet.  But here's what it does so far:
> 
> ;;;;;;
> > (require "help.ss")
> > (help-strings delete-directory)
> ("delete-directory\n(delete-directory path)\n (delete-directory
> path)\ndeletes an existing directory with the path path.  If
> the\ndirectory is deleted successfully, void is returned, otherwise\nthe
> exn:fail:filesystem exception is raised.")
> >
> > (help-strings make-hash-table)
> ("make-hash-table\n(make-hash-table [flag-symbol
> flag-symbol])\n\n\n(make-hash-table [flag-symbol flag-symbol]) creates and
> returns a\nnew hash table. If provided, each flag-symbol must one of\nthe
> following:\n")
> ;;;;;;
> 
> 
> There are some presentation things I'll need to do, and some corrections
> in how it extracts documentation, but I think it's a good start so far.
> When it starts actually working right, I'll be happy to turn it into a
> PLaneT package.
> 
> The source code is here:
> 
> http://aztec.stanford.edu/svn/repos/personal/dyoo/scratch/plt/help/
> 
> The help code works under the assumption that the mzscheme and r5rs
> documentation have been installed locally under collects/doc.  But at the
> moment, the code appears only to sorta work on things defined in the
> MzScheme Reference Manual, because the R5RS documentation organizes its
> summary strings differently, and my HTML scraping is very fragile.
> 
> 
> I guess I'm looking for feedback on what I can do to make this actually
> work; one of my main problem now seems to be robust HTML scraping issues.
> 
> At the moment, I'm just using the html and xml collections provided as
> part of PLT Scheme to extract content from the HTML-ified reference
> documentation, but the parsers seem particularly unhappy about the
> non-well-formedness in there.  Should I be using a different set of
> parsers.