CoCoA:Man

From ApCoCoAWiki

Man

search online help system

Description

The Man function is used to search the online help system for

information matching a keyword.

In the forms ?key and ??key, the key is a literal string.

This means that key should not appear enclosed in quotes.

For instance, ?gbasis is equivalent to Man("gbasis");. The command ? is case insensitive and does not notice blank space before or after key. Also, the semicolon usually required at the end of a line of CoCoA input is optional. (? was introduced in CoCoA 4.2)

The online help contains a manual and a list of commands. Each

section of the manual and each command has an associated list of

keywords. To explain how the search system works, we will use the following terminology: say the key S matches a keyword K if S is a substring of K, not counting capitalization. The key S is an exact match if it is identical to K, not counting capitalization. The command ?S searches for keywords in the online help system matching the S. If only one match occurs or an exact match occurs, the corresponding information is displayed. Otherwise, if more than one match occurs (and no exact match), matching keywords are listed. It is often advisable to make search words small at first to get as many matches as possible.

Example

?po

See:
  Commands and Functions for Polynomials
  DensePoly
  EquiIsoDec
  Evaluation of Polynomials
  Factoring Polynomials

            --> Output suppressed  <--

?for poly

============ Commands and Functions for Polynomials =============

The following are commands and functions for polynomials:

            --> Output suppressed  <--

Intelligent choice of the string S can save a lot of typing. For example, there are many sections in the manual whose titles begin: Commands and Functions for; in the example above, we matched the corresponding section for polynomials by choosing the search string for poly.

The command ??S displays all keywords in the online help system that

match S (an exact match is not required, and *all* keywords are listed

even if there is an exact match).

Example

??gbasis

See:
  GB.Start_GBasis
  GBasis
  ReducedGBasis
-------------------------------

Typing ?gbasis, with a single question mark produces only the manual entry for GBasis.

The function Man is equivalent to ? except it requires an actual

string, e.g., Man("gbasis") rather than Man(gbasis).

Man with the optional second argument set to the number 0 is equivalent to ??. Since Man requires more typing than ?, there should never be a need to use it.

Note: The set of keywords associated with any section of the manual

always includes the title of the manual, so it might help to first

take a look at the table of contents, using H.Toc. (The titles of Parts, which are numbered by H.Toc do *not* appear as keywords: only titles of chapters and sections.) Similarly, the set of keywords for a command always includes the command's name. The complete list of documented commands can be printed by entering H.Commands("").

Syntax

? key
?? key
where <em>key</em> is a literal string (without quotes)

Man(S:STRING):NULL
Man(S:STRING,N:INT):NULL

where N = 0 or 1.

H.Commands

H.Syntax

Shortcuts

   <type>help</type>
   <type>online-help</type>