REPL Correction

[arnavs]

There's a useful terminal utility on macOS called fu*k, which tries to contextually fix typos (and is fairly effective).

I wonder if something like this is possible for Julia. For example, if we detect (say) an unclosed parantheses sequence, or a misspelling of a common command, typing in something like fixit will pre-load an ordered set of guesses.

[affans]

This is similar to Matlab where the error for wrong command error will return something like did you mean abs(). Not sure if this is really needed though. Maybe it would be better to list a few similar functions based on heuristics?

[ararslan]

Maybe it would be better to list a few similar functions based on heuristics?

We do that in the REPL help mode, and I feel like what we have now is actually a fairly solid solution, at least for typos.

julia> abbs(1)
ERROR: UndefVarError: abbs not defined
Stacktrace:
 [1] top-level scope at none:0

help?> abbs
search:

Couldn't find abbs
Perhaps you meant abs, abs2, acos, axes, acosd, acosh, acot, acsc, all, all!, any, any!, asec, asin, atan, base, names, pairs, less, whos, Dims, Docs or Libc
  No documentation found.

  Binding abbs does not exist.

Note the "perhaps you meant" section.

[arnavs]

I think the use cases are a bit different, though. Because REPL help mode is to let people find functions/objects, whereas REPL correction would be to help people run code.

Edit: sorry, didn't notice you were responding to affans.

[ViralBShah]

Perhaps this is better to discuss on discourse. We can only work with PRs and issues (bugs etc.) here, not so much major features such as this.

[arnavs]

@ViralBShah Thanks, will do.