[Lazarus] installing chm help

[Hans-Peter Diettrich]

waldo kitty schrieb:

> also basic things like 'writeln', 'write', and similar do not give any 
> help... but then some stuff, like 'integer' popup with a "Help selector" 
> window as mentioned above and one of the two RTL (ahh! found a RTL[] 
> hit) options (objpas.pp) talks about "redefinition of integer as 32-bit 
> type" whereas the other one (systemh.inc) says "a signed 16-bits 
> integer"...
> 
> so which one is correct?

IMO "Integer" is a compiler built-in type, and thus it doesn't have a 
reference to the current declaration. The same for Char and string types :-(

I already mentioned that flaw, and suggested conditional declarations:
{$IFDEF fpdocsystem}
type
   integer = LongInt;
   cardinal = LongWord;
   ...
   char = WideChar;
   string = UnicodeString;
   ...
{$ENDIF}

In my own docs I added topics for all basic types. Common to all these 
workarounds is the missing correspondence to the effective declarations, 
so that "a signed 16-bits integer" entry will survive ad nauseam, if 
nobody happens to find and update such entries. E.g. AnsiChar is 
described as an alias for Char, which in fact should read the opposite 
way, and nowadays even Char=WideChar.

I found no time yet to create an overview of all the basic (built-in) 
types, which would allow to update all these types in one single place, 
whenever the declarations are changed in the compiler.


> why does basic stuff, eg: 'write' and 'writeln' not have any help at all?

Thanks, I didn't realize that yet. It's for the same reason: these are 
compiler magics, for which FPDoc doesn't find a declaration in the 
source code, and consequently ignores all such <element>, even if they 
exist in the XML files. See above for possible workarounds.


> where is the help for items like 'PadRight', 'AddChar', 'PadLeft', 
> 'AddCharR' and similar??

I just can't find in which units these are declared. The FCL is only 
documented to a small percentage, perhaps these functions reside in such 
undocumented units?


> remember, "we" are coming at this as a pure newbie with some coding 
> knowledge, no books, and an extremely simple background in programing... 
> yes, much of the basic stuff really does need to be specified ;)

Please create an according FPC bug report, if none exists yet, and hope 
that somebody will update the documentation.

DoDi