Searching Online Documentation

I went fishing on google for operations on ranges

chapel range operations

It finds

https://chapel-lang.org/docs/primers/ranges.html

and

https://chapel-lang.org/docs/1.14/builtins/ChapelRange.html

Nothing else was found. Looking in the primer gives no reference to the operations. Not terribly useful. I figured that looking at 1.14 was useless.

I went to my Go-To solution and jumped into an old PDF spec and found an operation on which I wanted information and then went fishing again with

chapel range operations expand

and it finds the right thing, i.e.

https://chapel-lang.org/docs/language/spec/ranges.html

Overall, a bit clunky. If I had looked in the 1.14 builtins, I could have found the name of an operator and avoided looking at the old PDF.

Someone might want to look into this when they have a bit of spare time.

Hi Damian —

In past years, I've wrestled a fair amount with trying to make Google search results point to the latest Chapel docs with some modest improvements. But mostly, I found that (a) it's pretty hard to get Google to return the results you want and (b) there didn't seem to be a way to tell Google explicitly "Hey, if you're referring to these files, these other ones would actually be better/newer", at least, last that I looked. Here's where I was tracking that effort at one point: Google search should refer to latest versions of Chapel docs · Issue #8693 · chapel-lang/chapel · GitHub

However, keep in mind that Google search is often customized to your personal search history (depending on your browser, how logged in you are, etc.) as well as your search terms. So a difficult aspect to factor in here is the degree to which your search points to 1.14 because that's a page you've gone to in the past ("so it must be valuable!"). When I open up an incognito window and do your same "chapel range operations" search, I get pointers to the 1.26 primer and spec which is encouraging:

So you might try doing the search from an incognito window and see if you get different results.

All that said, I also do searches sometimes that point me to old documentation, so am not trying to suggest things are perfect.

When the results are old, the documentation version bar in the upper right of each page should be flagged red to draw your attention to that, and using it to select the current documentation should jump you to the current version of that file if the name of that page exists in both versions. If not, it'll take you to the root of the documentation in the newer version. In your specific case, I can follow your 1.14 link, use the menu to pick the 1.26 documentation and see what things look like today. However, there will be an upcoming release in which this documentation moves fully into the spec and that trick would not have worked for this page.

-Brad

Thanks for the insight. Looks like a tough problem to solve.

I often find the style in which the primer is written is too brief. And sadly, I do not have to time to enhance it. Such work might be a good idea for multiple student projects

Thanks again