PYTHON IS CRAP

[David Bolen]

"Alex Martelli" <alex at magenta.com> writes:

> I think that one of the many forms Python docs are available in
> is plain text -- and if not, lynx or other tools can easily turn the
> HMTL into plaintext for you.  Then you can keep the .txt file
> open in Emacs, VIM, or whatever, and textsearch at leisure.

Yeah, but that's still less convenient than just do something like:

	> pyman string.split

(e.g., a direct lookup on precisely the API entry you are interested
in, in just the way it gets used by the application)

and getting just the entry for string.split, nothing but that entry,
in a standardized reference output format.  Text searching would turn
up other uses of the term, for example, and dumping the current HTML
documentation to plain text loses too much context in terms of markup
to aid in such searching.

In terms of textual representation I already have the Emacs info file
versions of the documentation, which are nice, but still aren't quite
there with respect to raw reference searches (it still takes some
effort to navigate to the right spot, or searching matching within the
text as opposed to identifying the actual location of a definition).
I haven't had an opportunity to wrap them in some custom elisp to see
how well I could improve that however.

Even the Windows-CHM version is a little wobbly in this area - if I
just search for "string.split" I get a whole lot of references back,
and have to know to go into the string module, and even then just get
to the overall section.  If I look in the index for string.split, I
don't get anything (except for low level documentation on a string
object), but if I do the search just for "split" then I get several
entries, one of which is the string module I can select and does go
right to the entry.

This isn't a major thing, but just something I do miss.  Ah well, who
knows, if I manage to find some free time maybe I'll try doing some
stuff myself.  :-)

--
-- David
-- 
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