[Haskell-cafe] Information given by :info (Was: Some randomnewbie questions)

[John Velman]

On Tue, Jan 11, 2005 at 12:21:35PM -0000, Simon Marlow wrote:
> On 10 January 2005 10:26, Sebastian Sylvan wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 10:30:46 +0100 (MEZ), Henning Thielemann
> > <iakd0 at clusterf.urz.uni-halle.de> wrote:
> >> What I also would like to see is the Haddock documentation
> >> string of a function printed by ":info" or some other command.

SWI Prolog has a predicate, "apropos" of arity 1.  When appropos(xxx) is
invoked from the interactive console (which is comparable to the HUGS of
GHCi console), a  new process is started in a window.  The window has two
panes one with a table of contents tree for the manual, one with brief
descriptions of the predicate xxx. There is also an entry box for a new
search, and a menu.

It seems that it wouldn't be too hard to put together something similar
that would work from either the HUGS or GHCi console.  It would be too
large a project of me at the moment :-).

SWI Prolog uses XPCE, which is distributed with SWI Prolog, for the GUI.

Best,

John Velman

> >> 
> > 
> > Now _that_ would be truly useful.
> 
> It's not perfect, but it's better than nothing:
> 
> :def doc (\s -> let (rvar,rmod) = break (=='.') (reverse s); var =
> reverse rvar in System.Cmd.system ("mozilla
> http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/base/" ++ reverse
> rmod ++ "html#" ++ (if (Data.Char.isUpper (head var)) then "t:" else
> "v:") ++ var) >> return "")
> 
> eg.
> 
> Prelude> :doc Prelude.head
> 
> You have to use a qualified name, it only works in package base, and you
> can't look up data constructors.  Any hackers out there want to try
> lifting these restrictions?
> 
> Cheers,
> 	Simon
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