On Tue, 11 Oct 2005, Tomas Hajny wrote:
Elio Cuevas Gómez wrote:
El Lun 10 Oct 2005 19:19, Bob Richards escribió:
.
.
The biggest problem I have run into is the function/procedure
documentation. While very complete, and clearly written, it is organized
in
a way making it difficult to find things. Similar functions and
procedures
are scattered among various Units, making things difficult to locate.
What
I need is a reference document, listing procedures and functions by
category (or at the very least alphabetically as in the Turbo Pascal 5.0
Reference guide). All disk-file routines for instance, listed, in one
place.
Well, the functions are organized by unit. The IO functions are in the
system
unit i think. Misc functions are in the SysUtils unit, etc...
.
.
Well, to be honest, I don't think this is a complete answer. It's
certainly true that you can achieve similar effects by using different
functions stored in different units. From this point of view, some kind of
categorization of supplied units would probably help, in fact - as it is
now, it's a list of units without providing any hint what to search where.
I don't think that it makes sense to try to list e.g. "all disk I/O
functions", because different things would be mixed together and it
probably wouldn't help either.
Such categorization should probably include different programming models
(procedural, TP/BP style OOP, Delphi style OOP), whether ansistrings are
used or not (default with -Mdelphi/$MODE DELPHI or $H+), cross-platform
and platform specific units (with information about their
availability/useability for different targets), basic information about
type of functionality to be found there (similar to the "Overview" chapter
in individual unit descriptions, which is unfortunately little bit
uncomplete regarding information about categories mentioned above and even
missing altogether for many units) and availability of this unit in other
Pascal compilers (at least TP/BP, Delphi and FPC specific). Something like
this should probably appear at the beginning of the unit reference. From
this point of view, I'd suggest to fill your comment as a "Wishlist" type
bug record for area "Documentation" in our bug repository, so it doesn't
get forgotten.
My (simplified) categorization to get you started (before we manage to get
it to our documentation):
I think you would be far more productive if some kind of search function
would be implemented.
Michael.
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