Re: routine_info for builtin stuff.

[mallors(at)msfc.nasa.gov (Robert S. Mallozzi)]

In article <k0ogjyk5es.fsf@regge.strw.leidenuniv.nl>,
	Carsten Dominik <dominik@strw.leidenuniv.nl> writes:
> 
> Hi
> 
> Yesterday I learned about ROUTINE_INFO which is incredible useful
> to find out about the arguments of procedures and functions without
> having to look into the file.
> 
> Now I am looking for a way to get the same information about builtin
> routines without having to look into hyperhelp.  Hyperhelp is OK when
> you want to know all the details about a function, but I find slow and
> clumsy when I just have forgotten the names of available keywords.
> 
> Obviously (?) this cannot be done with ROUTINE_INFO, because it
> unfortunately does not allow the /SYSTEM keyword together with
> /PARAMETERS keyword.  This is too bad and would be a good topic for an
> extension request.  Anyone at RSI reading this?

I agree!  It is quite frustrating to start "Hyperhelp" 
just because you forgot one keyword.  I would love to 
see something like

   IDL> SHOW_INFO, 'WIDGET_CONTROL'

and have the help page printed to the terminal window.  

 
> If there is no function to get this information, how can I get a table 
> of all builtin routines with their arguments in machine-readable form?
> I have looked at the hyper-help files, but they are binary, so the
> info cannot be extracted from them (at least I cannot...)

I looked on Bristol's web site, and they don't appear to provide
any information about their file formats, so I wrote a 
skeleton of a routine that parses the Postscript
output from Hyperhelp.  It's pretty crude though, because you
lose a lot of formatting information in the process.  It's not
quite ready to use, but I could probably clean it up if anyone
is interested.  

By the way, ROUTINE_INFO (/SYSTEM) provides some routines that
so not appear in the online help at all, for example, 
WIDGET_SET_RESOURCE.  Also, BEEP is listed there :-)

Regards,

-bob mallozzi



-- 
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Robert S. Mallozzi                                       256-544-0887
                                                      Mail Code ES 84
Work: http://gammaray.msfc.nasa.gov/     Marshall Space Flight Center 
Play: http://cspar.uah.edu/~mallozzir/           Huntsville, AL 35812
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