On Thu, Nov 23, 2017 at 8:44 AM, Marcus Comstedt (ACROSS) (Hail Ilpalazzo!) @ Pike (-) developers forum 10353@lyskom.lysator.liu.se wrote:
The other is the addition of a new help() built-in function, which gives human-readable information about whatever object it's given. Currently it shows a little information about functions and programs, and not much else; the intent is that it can be expanded at will, since it's purely human-readable. There is no backwards-compatibility guarantee about its specific output format.
This sounds like it might overlap with the existing "doc" function?
I'm not sure. help() is designed to work at runtime; doc doesn't seem to do much with functions and such, and I've never actually used it.
In my help() code, I have a TODO about having a command for it. Maybe the doc command could call help() in situations where that makes sense?
I've rebased the rosuav/hilfe-improvements branch onto current 8.1, so it's once again mergeable if this is of interest. The smaller change of suppressing quit/exit is merged into 8.1, leaving help() unmerged as yet.
ChrisA