[Lazarus] installing chm help

[waldo kitty]

On 2/15/2012 05:30, Hans-Peter Diettrich wrote:
> 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 :-(

it was but one of several i assumed would be documented by default :(

> 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.

yeah, i've run into some problems in a tool that i'm trying to complete with 
some of this type of stuff... i actually had to set sw_integer for some types 
that should have worked with integer... i /just/ found out what sw_integer is 
(objects unit - alias for longint)... but that brings me to another problem i 
think i may have run into but i gotta find the posts that pointed me in that 
direction and it has been a week or two :?

> 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.

ahhh... that might be a bit of a mess?

>> 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.

ahh... i found them quite quickly by hitting all routines and 'keywords' that 
/i/ didn't write in my project ;) for example, i know that i have not written 
any help (yet) for my TLEEpoch procedures and functions so testing docs by 
trying to find them won't work but a lot of other code i didn't write as it is 
mostly library code which i would expect to have been documented after all this 
time and these discussions...

>> 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?

these are in strutils... i found them by using uncle google which is quite the 
laugh because all of this is about *offline* help so these things can be found 
when one is unable to be online :lol:

>> 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.

i may figure out where and how to start but i've already got too much going on 
now :(