[Rd] Proposal: C API documentation - API index by category

Erez Shomron r-m@||@ @end|ng |rom erez@h@org
Sat Jul 20 14:17:46 CEST 2024


Hello R Core team,

As someone who working on bindings to the API, having an index of the public API is a very welcome change.

In order to improve the ability for users to explore the API, I would like to propose adding a section of the API Index by category. 

You already have the functions and variables categorized by section, so I would suggest to use sections as the categories, and inside each category sort alphabetically.
In any case,  whatever sorting strategy you come up with I would probably be fine as long as it's not alphabetical.

While listing everything together in alphabetical order is tolerable, it is easy to get lost when you don't know what you are looking for exactly. Also many functions that serve different purpose all start with (R_* or Rf_*) making alphabetical order more useless.

It would also be nice to have a third column with the declarations, but it would be lower priority for me as by now I'm used to grepping whatever declaration I need from the headers.

I am not familiar with texinfo, so I don't know if this is a trivial or tricky request. Hope it's not.

Thank you, whether you consider this or not.

Best regards,
- Erez
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