[anentropic]

> The PDF rendition of the reference manual, which takes the form of a large Unix man page, is over 600 pages long, with no index or table of contents. There are many ways to solve a given data processing problem with TXR.

"Good luck, you're on your own!"

[kazinator]

The "no index or TOC" isn't being touted as a feature, just that the page count is that without these (in documents like these, these features can contribute dozens to the page count). An index would be nice; patches welcome!

The HTML version that most people would be using has a TOC with two-way navigation to the section headings and is hyperlinked. Of course, man page reading allows easy searching.

[Jach]

I guess threads like this remind me why it's nice to have professional doc writers review my customer-facing text at work. ;) Congrats on your project getting some more attention! If you'll indulge a bit of bikeshedding, this particular miscommunication could probably be avoided in the future by changing the sentence to the short "The PDF rendition of the reference manual is over 600 pages long." Even if you add extra things to the PDF later the statement won't be incorrect and so you won't have to deal with nitpickers coming by next time with a comment like "But if you remove the index it's only 597 pages!"

Another edit preserving more of the original would be to replace the final "with no" with something like "even excluding any"...

[kazinator]

Thanks; I fixed that.

[nn3]

I've learned/used basic TXR some time ago. I had a text parsing problem that needed backtracing, and it seemed simpler to use TXR than to use implement this in python or perl.

Basic TXR matching is really quite simple. Match some patterns, generate a report at the end. The patterns are interleaved with the matching text, so it's more like a more powerful version of regexprs (but far more readable), than a normal programing language.

You can learn it quickly based on the provided examples.

It's just a few straight forward commands, although you have to wrap your mind how the backtracing parser works.

Most of the manual is about the LISP. I never used that part and I don't think it's really needed for 95+% of all text parsing/summarizing.

[cgio]

Well the HTML version has contents. 600 pages of documentation and with the information density I see in a quick skim would not imply a “you are on your own” mentality to me.

[ilovetux]

This. I have never seen a programming language brag about being inaccessible and having bad documentation.

[oddity]

I read it as honesty and not bragging. Few people set out to create a inaccessible language with bad documentation, but given enough time and users, most languages become one. I'd prefer language maintainers and users have enough self-awareness to not believe it is still the elegant and simple language of 20 years ago.

Edit: 10 years ago in this case.