[Info-vax] Helplib.hlb text challenges

David Jones osuvman50 at gmail.com
Fri Apr 1 14:04:23 EDT 2022


I started playing with the full text search feature of SQLite and decided the
system help library would be good source material for a project. The
transformation uncovered a few glitches in whatever tool was used to
generate the help files from the original documentation:

- Some places that create bulleted list use an 8-bit hyphen variant for the
  first item and a 7-bit hyphen for the rest.

- The CRTL documentation uses superscripts to describe number values
  that are powers of 2. In the help file the attribute is discarded, so 32-bit
  integers range from -231 to 231 (rather than -2^31 and 2^31).

- The CRTL documentation uses the 'greater than or equal' symbol to
  describe some number ranges, which gets replaced in the help file with
  a NUL.

- The description for "$ HELP RTL LIB$ LIB$RENAME_FILE arguments"
  mentions a qualifier for the DCL RENAME command which got wrapped
  to the beginning of the line. This causes help to falsely indicate that
  arguments has a qualifier.



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