[ESS] interactive sas help?

[tdhock at OCF.Berkeley.EDU]

Hi all,

Let me start by saying ESS is a wonderful boon to my productivity since I
started using it several years ago, and I have been glad to see active
development producing new and improved versions in the last year or so.

I started out with ESS as an R user, but now I am learning SAS for a
statistics masters in Paris. They teach the course using SAS on Linux with
X, but I managed to get iESS[SAS] running! It works very nicely, and
allows for rapid development of my SAS code.

The only feature I wish I had is an interactive help facility similar to
what we get in iESS[S] mode, where a help page pops up in a new buffer
after you type ?something (I love this feature). Is there any plan to
introduce a similar feature for iESS[SAS]? Is there any help I could do
with the development?

A couple ideas for implementation of the feature: I found where the SAS
help files are stored on my system, but they are in a binary format that I
can't read. (anybody know how to crack them?) A more straightforward
option may be to use an emacs web browser, i.e.
http://emacs-w3m.namazu.org/ or http://www.gnu.org/software/w3/ and point
it to online SAS HTML docs, i.e.
http://netra.msu.montana.edu/docs/sas/main.htm

Thanks in advance for any input/advice/suggestions,
Sincerely,
Toby Dylan Hocking
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~tdhock/