[Haskell-cafe] Hoogle search scope question -- was: [HXT] Simple question

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi

> I have a hoogle question. While I was reading the HXT discussion
> (below), I tried to search "runX" and "readString" in Hoogle (since I
> am new to HXT and Arrows). But neither search yielded any result and I
> had to use google to find the Haskell docs.
>
> So I am wondering what is the scope of Hoogle that people can search?

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Hoogle#Scope_of_Searches (new
section just added)

> Only things in the standard library?

Mainly those things distributed with GHC.

> How much does it cover in the Hackage?

Virtually none. This will change at some point in the future.

> I tried to find the scope description in the Tutorial but in
> vain. It is fair to say if someone needs to use Hoogle, he/she
> probably has no idea what he is looking for, needless to say, what is
> in scope of Hoogle or what is not.

In general, Hoogle is designed if you want to find a generally
applicable function. If you are using HXT, then you probably know
whether you want a general function or one that works over the HXT
data types/classes/monads etc. I do want to expand Hoogle to search
everything on hackage, and to have package specific searches as well,
but it requires more coding first.

Thanks

Neil