Re: [Chicken-users] Topics and a main index (was: egg documentation)

[Jim Ursetto]

Your topic idea is interesting.  My opinion, for what it's worth, is that it
imposes too much on the user when required for every definition.  Instead, if
any topic indexing is to be done in the future, I think the topics could be
drawn from the egg tags themselves.

For example, it's a safe bet that nearly all procedures in the "dyn-vector" egg
have to do with "vector", everything in the objc egg has to do with "macosx",
"objc" and "oop", and everything in "matpak" has to do with "matrix" and
"vector".  And I think it's fine if matpak's mat-inner-product, which is for
vectors, is listed under both "matrix" and "vector".

I think using the egg tags (categories) would be sufficient for any future
index.  Any more granular and there is a high barrier to entry.  Users would
avoid changing entries for fear of putting something in the wrong category;
old hands would get fatigued at choosing topics for every definition.

On 2/19/08, Tobia Conforto <address@hidden> wrote:
> In this spirit, I propose another addition: topics, meaning relevance
> to something:
>
> <proc topics="stream cons higher-order">(stream-xcons a b)</proc>
>
> This would make it possible to build a dynamic index system of all the
> definitions (procedures, macros, records...) that have something to do
> with consing, and/or with streams, and/or with higher-order procedure
> usage or any other topic used in at least one definition.  Other
> topics could be: list, vector, string, port, networking, html, eval,
> threading, fold, map, cgi, timedate...