The Help File
Keywords: gildas-prog

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The Help File

The `HELP` files are simple text files with two levels of help. The list of help topics in the library should be identical to the list of commands of the program. In addition, a specific topic named `LANGUAGE` should include a one line description of all commands, with a subtopic named `NEWS` which describe the latest news on the specific language.

The `HELP` files format is the following

          1 TOPIC
              help for this topic
          2 SUBTOPIC
              help for a subtopic of the previous topic
          1 OTHER_TOPIC
              text for other_topic
          1 ENDOFHELP

where 1 and 2 are in the first column of the text file, and followed by a single space. This format is easy to modify as it is a simple text file, but much slower to access because it is sequential. The `1 ENDOFHELP` (with no trailing characters) sequence indicates the end of the help file.

The help file name should be assigned to the logical name specified in the `SIC_BEGIN` call, or given explicitly.