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5.2.1 Online Help
***** NOT YET UPDATED TO CoCoA-5: follow with care *****

CoCoA's online help is roughly divided into two parts: a manual and a list of commands. The manual includes a tutorial which can be started by entering

?tutorial

If you are a new user of CoCoA, the tutorial is a good place to start. To see the titles of the sections of the online manual, enter H.Toc() ; to see a list of commands, enter H.Commands("") .

Each section of the manual and each command is uniquely identified by a set of keywords. The set of keywords always includes the title of the section or the title of the command. The online help command ? takes a string from the user and searches for a match among the keywords. For instance, ?gbasis will display information about the function GBasis . Note that when using ? , the keyword does not appear in quotes. Also, a semicolon is not required.

The command ?? will return a list of entries in the manual that contain a given keyword. For instance, ??gbasis returns
    See:
      GB.Start_GBasis
      GBasis
      ReducedGBasis
    -------------------------------
Each command is associated with a list of topics. (This applies only to commands, not to sections of the manual.) The online help function H.Commands takes a string from the user and searches for all matches among these topics. For each match, the title of the command and a brief description is displayed. For instance, H.Commands("poly") will find all commands having to do with polynomials. Information about a specific command can then be retrieved with ? . A list of topics is provided by H.Commands() , with no argument.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Searches are case insensitive and your keyword need only be a substring to make a match.

For a thorough description of the search function ? , type ? ? with a space between the two questions marks.

Tips on using online help and summary of the online help functions appear below. Enter H.Browse(); to see the next section.