[R] R Function Guide

[Prof Brian D Ripley]

On Tue, 5 Jun 2001 freud at starpower.net wrote:

> I was wondering if there was anything for R like the function guide
> provided by insightful for S-Plus at the url below:

Yes, there is.

> http://www.insightful.com/resources/fguide.html
>
> What makes if particularly appealing is the organization of
> functions by class.

That's the same as done by their help.start(), and is very similar to the
html search page in R, which does group by category (`keyword').
Even the categories are very similar.

However, given the number of functions involved (of the order of 2000)
I do find searches more useful (in either system).  There are quite a lot
of functions in S-PLUS which are not in what is to me the obvious category,
but they will be found by a search.   Thre have been lots of postings to
R-help recently where help.search() would have given the answer, so it
looks like an under-used tool.

Also that guide only covers functions in base S-PLUS: R's equivalents
cover all installed packages.  Nothing covers all 120+ packages on CRAN,
let alone those which are not on CRAN.  We do get requests for the latter,
but my own view is that we need better search mechanisms first (both faster
and using approximate matching).

[...]

-- 
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 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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