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Bug #1303

Manual looking for "?"

Added by John Abbott over 4 years ago. Updated about 4 years ago.

Status:
Rejected
Priority:
Low
Assignee:
John Abbott
Category:
Manual/documentation
Target version:
CoCoA-5.3.0
Start date:
27 Aug 2019
Due date:
% Done:

100%

Estimated time:
0.75 h
Spent time:
0.60 h

Description

CoCoA's behaviour on the following inputs is a bit unexpected:

? ?
? ??
? ???
? ????

Note: I found this because I had inadvertently left a ??? in some CoCoA code.

History

#1 Updated by John Abbott about 4 years ago

  • Status changed from New to In Progress
  • Assignee set to John Abbott
  • Target version changed from CoCoA-5.?.? to CoCoA-5.3.0
  • % Done changed from 0 to 50

So what happens (now) is that the first ? of the search string is discarded.

Presumably ?<whitespace>? is recognized as ??.

This is mildly unfortunate, but not a major problem.

The relevant code seems to be quite convoluted. I think the place to intervene would be Lexer::getHelpStatement.
Probably to do this correctly (i.e. to disallow whitespace between the two question-marks) we'd need to introduce a new type of help stmt, and make getHelpStatement or the tokenizer more complicated.

It seems hard to justify such complication just to make CoCoA behave a little better when someone types in many question marks.
Anyway, the behaviour CoCoA is not that bad... the only problem is that it is tricky to look up "?" in the online manual (you have to type ??? and not ? ? as you might expect).

I propose rejecting this issue.

#2 Updated by John Abbott about 4 years ago

  • Status changed from In Progress to Rejected
  • % Done changed from 50 to 100
  • Estimated time set to 0.75 h

As previously written, this is not harmful; and it is better to direct our limited resources elsewhere.

Rejecting (so effectively closing).

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