Re: Patches item #1729825 ready to go.

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Monday 04 June 2007 13:31, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
> 1) Help now resolves keywords individually as opposed to a whole line of text 
> (i.e., things like "help se ter post" are understood).  The algorithm goes with 
> most matching characters as the "winning" help line, and if there is a tie then 
> it is the most number of whole matches.

Sounds good. Let's see if it survives stress-testing.
 
> 2) History is much more robust to recursion detection.  I went with an algorithm 
> that will complain if every a command off the history stack is run more than 
> once in a series of history recalls.  For example
> 
> plot x; hist !plot
> plot x; hist !plot

I cannot imagine anyone having a legitimate reason for issuing such a command.
Can't we just forbid commands of the form "hist !command" unless they are the
first and only thing on the line?

In fact, I can't think of a reason to ever allow a "hist" command except
at the beginning of a line.  Why would you want to do this? 

> 3) History now has recall by number, e.g., "hist !123".  A bit tricky to 
> implement given the shuffling behavior we have, but I think I've got it.  (No 
> sense in numbering the stack if we can't recall by number.)

Does that number stay constant?  I.e., if I go to the trouble of figuring
out that some complicated upstream command was "!123",  will that still be
true 10 minutes later after various intervening commands?   If not, then
this option is a non-starter.  

> Note, as far as shuffling it would be easy to make an option for that.  I point 
> this out because if someone is using recall by number, shuffling of the stack 
> can cause a problem.

Er, why are we shuffling the stack?

-- 
Ethan A Merritt