RE^2: [Rd] New generic functions in "R base" {was `truncate'}

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Wed, 23 May 2001, Paul Gilbert wrote:

> >Actually, this illustrates a problem and raises another issue.  As it
> turns
> >out, I'm not the only one to have (unnecessarily) re-implemented the
> >features of confint() because it didn't occur to me to look in MASS for
> it.
> >I'm sure that others have had the same thing happen.
> 
> Some search/browse capability sure would be nice and I think this
> problem is going to get worse with the elimination of function.html in R
> 1.3.0.  Perhaps there is a possibility of putting a giant index of all
> functions in all packages on CRAN?

Not only is it nice, but we do already have it, twice, in fact!

There are two search/browse facilities for all current libraries (and I
mean that, not packages), namely help.search() and the Java-based HTML
search.  Try them some time!

> help.search("confidence interval")
Help files with alias or title matching `confidence interval':
Type `?FOO' to inspect entry `FOO(PKG) TITLE'.

confint(MASS)           Confidence Intervals for Model Parameters
[...]

So why would removing an *index* affect the ability to search?

-- 
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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