nma124

You would think that the help page for "Rational" will, under
the "see also" section, would also mention the function
"Rationalize" as well, right?

I was looking for a function to convert a real number to
rational. So I did ?Rational, and was happy to see something show
up. But no mention of a function to do this as no link to
Rationalize from there. silly me, I did not think of doing search
on "Rationalize". I mean, what is the point of having help to search
for something if one knows what the function name is to start with?

This is the see also section of mma Rational:

"See also: Rationals, Integer, Numerator, Denominator. "

Also doing help on "Rationalize" does not have a link to "Rational"
(At least mma is very consistant I must say).

In general I found mma on-line help to be weak, this is compared to
maple help, which has the best "see also" section that I have seen, and
plenty of examples as well.

I suggest that the Wolfram company hire someone to improve the
on-line help. Add much more examples and more "see also" links.

But I do like the link to sections in the mma book from mma help, this
is a nice touch.

Now, compare this to maple: When I typed
?rational

I get

There are several matching topics. Try one of the following:

type,rational
odeadvisor,rational
flavor,rational
convert,rational
SumTools,IndefiniteSum,Rational
CurveFitting,RationalInterpolation

And here we see the convert to rational function right away.

Another complaint:

Not only that, mma will not even show help if one does not type the
name as is with upper case first letter, look:

?rational
Information::notfound: Symbol rational not found.

It does not even mention possible typo and to suggest typing Rational as
it does 100 times if I do that in any other place in the code. see:

rational[3, 4]

General::spell1: Possible spelling error: new symbol name "rational" is
similar to existing symbol "Rational".

Now why did it not say that when when I asked for help on "rational"
instead of "Rational" ??

dan

Some options...

Names["*Ration*"]
{"Rational","RationalFunctions","Rationalize", "Rationals"}

Names["Rationalizze", SpellingCorrection -> True]
{"Rationalize"}


--
Dana DeLouis
Using Windows XP & Office XP
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

richard fateman

Try
?Ration*

or ?*ation*

....