Documenting data sets

[Prof Brian D Ripley]

On 30 Mar 1999, Douglas Bates wrote:

> Has a format for the documentation of data sets been established?  The
> prompt function applied to a data set produces a brief outline.  I
> notice that the data documentation in the MASS library, for example,
> is more complete.

That was translated from Sd. On S-PLUS there are two formats for data given
by prompt.data.frame and prompt.default (for all non-functions). Over the
years we have expanded the dataset documentation: for example I tried about
a year ago to give references wherever possible.

It would be helpful to have more for this sort of thing in R. One thing I
find problematic is the use of \item: I find quite often that the use of
items (.AG or .RC) in .Sd format translates to invalid .Rd. There are
restrictions on the use of \item (as we saw for nlm.Rd) that could do with
being lifted. I need to give more thought to exactly what, though.

Brian

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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