Re: [Gnucap-devel] Proposal for man pages

[al davis]

On Thursday 15 August 2013, Rishabh Yadav wrote:
> Ngspice has devhelp command which provides information on all
> devices but Gnucap lacks these things so I was thinking of
> writing "man pages" which will provide complete
> documentation on each command.This will help users alot
> instead of looking for the command in manual everytime they
> can directly use man command to get the information of the
> command.

Good idea ..

I started it a long time ago with a help_dispatcher and virtual 
function "help(CS&, OMSTREAM&)const" in e_base.h.

That is as far as I got.

The idea is to have a new "help" command that uses the 
help_dispatcher to look up topics.  Then everything can have a 
help() function that prints the needed help.  Eventually it 
could become a standard part of all plugins.

It could use the other dispatchers too, to provide some kind of 
hierarchy and eliminate the need for everything to make an 
explicit entry in help_dispatcher.

The code for the help function could be very simple.  The real 
work is in entering the text everywhere.  Hopefully it could be 
done in such a way as to provide several modes ....  
interactive, texinfo, printed manual, web ... and only require 
the text to be typed in once.