[Rd] qpois Help problems (PR#14200)

maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch
Mon Feb 1 17:30:25 CET 2010

>>>>> "JL" == Jerry Lewis <Jerry.Lewis at biogenidec.com>
>>>>>     on Fri, 29 Jan 2010 22:50:12 +0100 (CET) writes:

JL> Full_Name: Jerry W. Lewis
JL> Version: 2.10.1
JL> OS: Windows XP Professional
JL> Submission from: (NULL) (198.180.131.21)

JL> In the line

JL> "The quantile is right continuous: qpois(q, lambda) is the smallest integer x
JL> such that P(X <= x) >= q."

JL> "q" is used as a probability when the Arguments section defines it to be a
JL> quantile.

Yes.  I agree this can be slightly confusing.
Thank you for the note.

Note however that *mathematically* the above is entirely
correct.  It just uses  'q' instead of 'p', but as you know, in
math you are allowed to use whatever letters you want.....
as long as they are used consistently within one context.
As the 'Usage:' and 'Arguments:' parts are "R-codish", using R
object names, rather than mathematical notation, they are
"out of context" from the math formula point of view  ;-)
..
I have changed that part to use 'p' now, ...
but for R-devel only, as indeed, it's *not* a bug fix.

JL> Also there are some representation problems where the escape character is
JL> printed instead of interpreted, such as "\ldots" and "\lambda" in the preceding
JL> lines.

"printed" meaning what?
How exactly are you looking at that help page?
Is it the HTML version or the text version?

In any case, I'd guess that this is problem specific to your
platform, but maybe reproducible by others,
if you'd give the details...

Regards,
Martin Maechler,
ETH Zurich