[Rd] RFC: What should ?foo do?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Fri, 25 Apr 2008, Deepayan Sarkar wrote:

> For what it's worth, I use ?foo mostly to look up usage of functions
> that I know I want to use, and find it perfect for that (one benefit
> over help() is that completion works for ?). The only thing I miss is
> the ability to do the equivalent of help("foo", package = "bar");
> ?bar::foo gives the help page for "::". Perhaps that would be
> something to consider for addition.

That fits most naturally with the (somewhat technical) idea that bar::foo 
becomes a symbol and not a function call.  I believe that several of think 
that is in principle a better idea, but no one has as yet (AFAIK) explored 
the ramifications.

However, 5 mins looking at the sources suggests that it is easy to do.

-- 
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)
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