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

[Marsland, John]

Might it be an idea to make "?" a special operator akin to "+" or "[", R
users could then write their own help functions - may be even making "?"
generic? With the proposed xml help system one could imagine quite
sophisticated context sensitive help systems.

Regards,

John Marsland

PS this has been a very useful debate for those of us enthusiastically using
S4 methods.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Duncan Murdoch [mailto:dmurdoch at pair.com]
> Sent: 12 June 2003 18:54
> To: Kurt.Hornik at wu-wien.ac.at
> Cc: r-devel at stat.math.ethz.ch; Gordon Smyth; John Chambers
> Subject: Re: Documenting classes and methods: was [Rd] Re: R-devel
> Digest, Vol 3, Issue 23
> 
> 
> 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).  
> 
> Duncan Murdoch
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
> https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
> 


********************************************************************** 
This is a commercial communication from Commerzbank AG.\ \ This ... {{dropped}}