Help message "tags" about additional help somewhat redundant and irrelevant

[Daniel J Sebald]

Just curious people's thoughts on the format of help documentation when 
running the command line "help" function.  It is of this format:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
'SOMEFUNC' is a function from the file <SYSTEM 
PATH>/octave/4.3.0+/m/plot/util/SOMEFUNC.m

COMMENTS ASSOCIATED WITH THE FUNCTION IN SOMEFUNC.m OR BUILTIN CODE

Additional help for built-in functions and operators is
available in the online version of the manual.  Use the command
'doc <topic>' to search the manual index.

Help and information about Octave is also available on the WWW
at http://www.octave.org and via the address@hidden
mailing list.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

For short help printouts, I find that those last paragraphs consume a 
lot of space and sort of obscure the actual printout.  For example (just 
found a bug... https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?50034):

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
octave:36> help --

 -- --
     Decrement operator.  As in C, may be applied as a prefix or postfix
     operator.

     See also: ++.

Additional help for built-in functions and operators is
available in the online version of the manual.  Use the command
'doc <topic>' to search the manual index.

Help and information about Octave is also available on the WWW
at http://www.octave.org and via the address@hidden
mailing list.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Anyway, it just seems to me that after short use of Octave, that 
"Additional help..." text becomes really redundant.  I wouldn't call it 
annoying, but it detracts from the cleanliness of the display, i.e., 
clutter.

Aside from the "seen that before, so I'll ignore it" factor, there is a 
lack of clarity as to exactly what those sentences mean.  For example, 
the first sentence refers to "online version of the manual".  That 
implies Internet (which does exist in nice form), but then the sentence 
after that indicates "doc ..." which is the same thing as the Internet 
version, I believe, but resident in the program.  And then the next 
paragraph mentions the web.  It seems to me that this info could be 
summarized less verbosely, say:

Use 'doc <topic>' or visit www.gnu.org/software/octave/doc/interpreter/
for further help, or inquire via the address@hidden mailing list.

and still capture the same info.

Now, as for the "Additional help for built-in functions and operators", 
that clause suggests relevance to built-ins.  However, it is always 
displayed.  So, if I do something like "help MYFUNC" for which the help 
is in a script file, I'm not really interested in built-ins and there is 
nowhere to go on the Internet or manual to get further information about 
my own function.

Dan