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HELP HELP Aaron Sloman, December 1988 The HELP facility provides online documentation about the Poplog languages, the editor, the window manager and the libraries. It includes a browsing facility that enables cross-references within help files to be followed up quickly and easily. CONTENTS - (Use <ENTER> g to access required sections) -- Introduction -- Summary help files using <ENTER> ?? -- Overview help files -- Listing potentially relevant help files -- Cross-references in HELP files -- Quitting a HELP file -- Related Documentation -- Introduction ------------------------------------------------------- Just as you can type to POP11 teach <topic> so you can also type help <topic> You can type this directly to the top-level prompt, or once inside the editor you can type it on the command line: i.e. <ENTER> help <topic> All the commands have to be terminated by pressing the <RETURN> key. E.g. this file is called up by typing help help -- Summary help files using <ENTER> ?? -------------------------------- Instead of a full help file you may wish to read a short summary of the topic. You can do this, in VED, with the command <ENTER> ?? <topic> e.g. <ENTER> ?? substring will print a summary description of the Pop-11 -substring- procedure. See HELP * QUERY for more details. -- Overview help files ------------------------------------------------ Some of the HELP files give overview descriptions of a range of related facilities. Examples are HELP * CONTROL and HELP * CLASSES. The most general overview HELP file is HELP * HELPFILES, which provides pointers to all the different categories of HELP files. A still more general file is HELP * DOCUMENTATION, which gives an overview of the different kinds of documentation accessible from VED. -- Listing potentially relevant help files ---------------------------- You can sometimes find out if there is help on a topic by typing <ENTER> helpfor <topic> This will print out the names of all the help files that include <topic> as a substring in their name. For example, try <ENTER> helpfor word -- Cross-references in HELP files ------------------------------------- Many help files have cross references to other help files. These are usually indicated by an asterisk preceding the name of the file, as in HELP * STRINGS. You can find the next such cross reference automatically by pressing the <ESC> key followed by the N key: this causes the editor to search for the next isolated asterisk (if there is one). To go back to a previous cross reference, press <ESC> and then <SHIFT> N. Once the cursor is on the asterisk, you can ask for the corresponding help file to be displayed by pressing the <ESC> key followed by the H key. This saves typing <ENTER> HELP name. -- Quitting a HELP file ----------------------------------------------- You can abandon a HELP file (or any other file) by pressing <ESC> then Q. (or <ENTER> q <RETURN>). -- Related Documentation ---------------------------------------------- See also HELP * DOCUMENTATION - General overview of Poplog documentation HELP * HELPFILES - overview of the help files HELP * INDEX - index of help files --- C.all/help/help --- Copyright University of Sussex 1991. All rights reserved. ----------