[R] A Few Suggestions to help out newbies

[Agustin Lobo]

On Tue, 2 Apr 2002, Lukas Kubin wrote:

> On Tue, 2 Apr 2002, Jonathan Baron wrote:
> 
> > >8) Command completion and contextual help in R.  The first one is
> > >probably fairly easy.  The second one is probably impossible.  It would
> > >involve giving out detailed help messages when things go wrong.  Not
> > >sure how to do that.
> >
> > Doesn't ESS do this?
> 
> Isn't this too automatical answer? I don't use Emacs and believe I'm not
> the only. But it is not the core problem. Why to connect as important
> basic (in my opinion) interface feature as command completion (at least)
> is with using a special text editor? In Octave, database interfaces and
> others command completion is a standard. So what's the reason not to
> include it in R?
> 

No, I don't think it's automatic, it's very reasonable. I'm not
quite a fan of (x)emacs-ESS, but it must be recognized that
it is much easier learning and using (x)emacs-ESS 
than developing the command completion feature. I think that 
an open source project such as R must take advantage 
of other open source projects whenever this is possible. If the
command completing feature exists in emacs-ESS, let's use
it there. Geting too big could kill R, because any new feature
implies maintainance and documentation. Therefore, I understand
that the R-core team focuses on developments that either
do not exist in other packages or that exist in packages that
cannot be easily linked to R.

Agus

Dr. Agustin Lobo
Instituto de Ciencias de la Tierra (CSIC)
Lluis Sole Sabaris s/n
08028 Barcelona SPAIN
tel 34 93409 5410
fax 34 93411 0012
alobo at ija.csic.es





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