[PD-dev] Work on "help" menu and help-patch searching spec

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

Its good to dream, and we've come up with a lot of interesting ideas.   
But I think at this point we need some basic implementation before we  
can really go into details.  A simple hack that parses a pre-defined  
set of keywords from a specially tagged comment in a help patch would  
be relatively easy to implement.  Then we can test it out, and take it  
from there.

So... the question remains, who actually wants to do some  
implementation?  I am sure I'll try my hand at this at some point, but  
I have no idea when.

.hc


On Apr 25, 2005, at 9:15 AM, Bryan Jurish wrote:

>
> morning folks,
>
> Just to add my -b¤ 0.02, I think Ben's idea of an integrated  
> help-file-A
> structuring and searching mechanism would be quite useful -- I'm
> currently using a perl script and grep to index my own abstractions
> along similar lines (topmost comment in the file together with
> some rather arbitrary string matching conventions which probably
> only apply for me), but a more comprehensive catalog, especially
> for builtin objects and externals, would be very helpful indeed.
>
>
> On 25 April 2005 at 14:05:18, IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:
>> yes, i still think that full-object-browsing will lead to
>> information-overdose if we don't limit ourselves to some structuring
>> mechanism, which in turn i think will be problematic (given the
>> different characters of pd-developers)
>
> Agreed.  Still, I think the option of adding one's own (arbitrary)
> keywords / structuring conventions is important too -- pre-defined
> hard categorization schemes have a disturbing tendency to go all
> goopy at the edges when they're not dictatorially enforced, which
> I don't think anyone here really wants to do or to be done; maybe
> the solution is just as simple as differentiating between "browsing"
> and "searching"?
>
>> probably we should ping bryan, as he might be the one with most
>> knowledge on auto-clustering words.
>
> Consider me ping'd [icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time~=3600000 ms] ;-)
>
> As it turns out, I happen currently to be working on an unsupervised
> word clustering system, although not directly along semantic lines.
> Still, there are methods for generating full-blown hierarchies and/or
> "flat" clusters based only on, say, word co-occurrences.  There's
> even a nifty technique to find the most salient dimesions (highest
> variance) in a feature data space.  Problems include (as you might
> expect): unsupervised clustering doesn't necessarily get you
> meaningful groupings; and perhaps more importantly from a user
> standpoint, it doesn't get you meaningful cluster labels (there are
> ways to work around this too, but they don't solve the basic problem);
> lastly, auto-clustering is computationally very expensive -- I might
> try running documentation comments through a co-occurence clustering
> algorithm, but I don't see any of these techniques becoming really
> useful at runtime -- at most we could use them to help induce an
> initial breakdown for existing objects...
>
> marmosets,
> 	Bryan
>
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________________________________________________________________________ 
____

Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to  
realize his wishes.
Now that he can realize them, he must either change them, or perish.
		                                     -William Carlos Williams

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