From: Mark Hubbart <discordantus@...>
Date: 2004-10-06T05:41:53+09:00
Subject: Re: Use ri from irb ?

On Wed, 6 Oct 2004 05:01:55 +0900, Michael Neumann <mneumann@ntecs.de> wrote:
> Its Me wrote:
> > What do I need to do to use ri from within irb? I can use it fine from the
> > (dos) command line.
> 
> That's handled in Programming Ruby 2 (Pickaxe II), page 191.
> 
> Add the following to your .irbrc file:
> 
>    def ri(*names)
>      system(%{ri #{names.map {|name| name.to_s}.join(" ")}})
>    end

Is it just me, or does that look a bit kludgy? ri itself is a ruby
script, and a ruby lib. It seems to me that there should be a clean
way of including the ri documentation in every object's methods... ie:

irb> require 'irb/ri'
  ==> true
irb> Kernel.docs
[... paged documentation output ...]
  ==> Kernel
irb> Kernel.docs(:puts)
[...]

... and so on. This should be able to be one programatically, rather
than spawning an ri process.

cheers,
Mark