Hi Ken and welcome to the PDL community! > On Nov 14, 2014, at 1:33 PM, LYONS, KENNETH B (KENNETH) > <k...@research.att.com> wrote: > > Yes, most of this I knew, but thanks. It’s because of that behavior of > > and <, that you mentioned, that I thought that ‘==’ would compare element by > element instead of on the whole vector. > > Have you ever tried, for example, to search the documentation for, say, the > function “list”? it gives you every occurrence of the word “list” in the > documents (which, needless to say, is rather voluminous, and the first few > hundred entries have nothing to do with the function!) there should be some > analog of the “man” command in unix that gives you information about the > *function* without all the other garbage. I think it’s just doing something > akin to a grep thru the documents.
In addition to the help/? and apropos/?? in the PDL shells (pdl2 and perldl) there is the command line version pdldoc which can be used starting with 'pdldoc pdldoc' to get the usage. When I do 'pdldoc -a list' I get 45 lines of output all of whose descriptions seem relevant to a general search for something having to do with 'list' including the 'list' command itself. This type of problem is not specific to PDL as searching the docs for any complicated system or program does tend to produce a large number of incomprehensible and not particularly useful results. It is definitely desired to have smarter and more useful documentation searches. The ability to add keywords would be nice and is on the feature request list, I believe. If you are on unix-ish system, you might try something like 'pdldoc -a list | grep --color list' to make the output more visually comprehensible. (We should probably add that to the PDL shell output) > It’s horribly designed in that regard. The software itself is great, and > I’m very happy with the results, but finding the simplest little thing in > the docs can be a total pain! I understand frustration. What would really help PDL development would be to know how you got to using PDL without being introduced to the concepts that would have made the learning curve less steep. (At least you found the mailing list and used it. :-) Happy PDL-ing! Chris _______________________________________________ Perldl mailing list Perldl@jach.hawaii.edu http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/perldl
