[Numpy-discussion] #734: interactive docstring search (lookfor)

[Joris De Ridder]

On 10 Apr 2008, at 23:23, Travis E. Oliphant wrote:

> Cool.  I started scipy.misc.info a long time ago to try and do  
> this.   I
> didn't advertise it well enough ;-)

Yep, I also started to write my own docsearch tool but neglected to  
advertise it.



On 10 Apr 2008, at 23:58, Gael Varoquaux wrote:

> Numpy is not the place where this should go. This should go in eg
> ipython, which provides an interactiv frontend. One of the reasons is
> that this is certainly not numpy-dependent.

I kind of disagree here. Such a tool can be made much more intelligent  
and thus useful if it really hooks into NumPy/SciPy. Provide "See  
also" functionality, give info on categories of functions, use magic  
words, etc. None of these things is too difficult to implement.  
However, such capabilities are beyond the more general docstring  
search tool that would be suitable for IPython. Of course, no problem  
if IPython is willing to special-case NumPy/SciPy.

Joris




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