From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,58e5da512e391bae X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,domainid0,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news2.google.com!news4.google.com!fu-berlin.de!newsfeed.arcor.de!newsspool3.arcor-online.net!news.arcor.de.POSTED!not-for-mail Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2010 16:48:34 +0200 From: Georg Bauhaus User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1.9) Gecko/20100317 Thunderbird/3.0.4 MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Ada help file indexed by keyword References: <4bcee4e0$0$6980$9b4e6d93@newsspool4.arcor-online.net> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <4bcf1043$0$6984$9b4e6d93@newsspool4.arcor-online.net> Organization: Arcor NNTP-Posting-Date: 21 Apr 2010 16:48:35 CEST NNTP-Posting-Host: c31e9ace.newsspool4.arcor-online.net X-Trace: DXC=9:4O5][bi1f016@cHD@m;j4IUKI`M6T[N9enc\616M64>jLh>_cHTX3jm0jS^QME64kk X-Complaints-To: usenet-abuse@arcor.de Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:11084 Date: 2010-04-21T16:48:35+02:00 List-Id: On 21.04.10 14:37, Manuel Collado wrote: > Do you suggest converting every instance of common words like 'with', > 'use', 'for', 'while', ... into a link to index entries? :-) Sort of, although I'd put more power into the hands of programmers looking for information. For each word, there will have to be some form of KWIC, where the 'C' is the part to be well defined. Since you outlined one possibility, I imagine making a ready-to-use help system "for keywords" will profit from observing the Google generation's approach to finding information. (Step 1) In general, if you want to learn about "for", type "for" into the search box. The search box will then suggest what you are looking for, and take you there. (Step 2) The universe of text to be indexed by the help system is restricted to text about the syntactic features of Ada. (Step 3) The one thing that an IDE would need is a specialized search box by another name (and slightly different display) supported by the language parser. Everything else is readily available, for example via Netscape Lisp (a.k.a. Javascript). The latter will give you context help for free. Therefore, (a) have an Ada parser look for key words, (b) on some event (mouse etc.) connected with the keyword, have the system display a ready made sub-document on top of the other text. (Code doing this is freely available.) So yes, a link is enough.