Re: scheme-describe-symbol

[Keisuke Nishida <kxn30@po.cwru.edu>]

Kalle Olavi Niemitalo <tosi@ees2.oulu.fi> writes:

> > ** Write scheme-describe-symbol and scheme-describe-object.
> > 
> > scheme-describe-symbol describes a symbol literally.
> > scheme-describe-object describes the object associated with a symbol.
> 
> What exactly would scheme-describe-symbol tell the user about the
> symbol, other than its name?
> 
> How does scheme-describe-object choose the module where it takes
> the definition of the symbol?  (Common Lisp has different symbols
> in different packages... Guile doesn't.)

I haven't thought enough about this yet, but I think there are two
cases where we want to use scheme-describe-*.

1. Find documentation by name.

Guile has documentation in guile-procedures.txt.  We have to search
this file by procedure names.

2. Find documentation by object.

An extreme example:

(define + -)
(+ 1 2)

In this case, we may want to find the documentation of `-' instead of
that of `+'.  We also want to describe slot information if the object
is a GOOPS object.

We could combine these two functions into one command, though.

The module can be decided by searching "(define-module ..." in the
current buffer, as scheme-eval-* does.

GOOPS methods could be described specially, like:

----------------------------------------
`+' is a method.

(+ <integer> <integer>)

  ....

(+ <real> <real>)

  ....

----------------------------------------

There are lots of things to do...

-- Kei