Documenting classes and methods: was [Rd] Re: R-devel Digest, Vol 3, Issue 23

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Thu, 12 Jun 2003, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

> On Mon, 9 Jun 2003 09:32:39 +0200, you wrote in message
> <16100.14359.920512.374624 at mithrandir.hornik.net>:
> 
> 
> >Re using 'foo-methods' as an alias, I am not sure whether this is
> >necessary in the long run.  To find out which methods are available, we
> >can use showMethod().  We should eventually [see below] be able to do
> >something like
> >
> >  method ? f(x="character", y = "numeric")
> >
> >to access the documentation object for the given signature, and there is
> >no guarantee that an f-methods Rd object really documents all methods
> >for the generic f in the package.  So I think eventually we should get
> >rid of the default foo-methods alias, and just dump the ones
> >corresponding to available methods.
> 
> I hope that at this point we also implement
> 
>  ?f(x,y)
> 
> at this point, to give the same result (where x and y are existing
> objects of classes "character" and "numeric", respectively).  

help on calls was promised at DSC2003, but John wasn't in on that 
discussion.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at 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 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595