[R] search site for R (http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu)

[Eric Lecoutre]

Hi,

I didn't know your search engine. Thank you very much for providing this 
tool. As far as I am concerned, I think that something like that was 
missing: R is growing so fast that it becomes difficult for the poor human 
to know all available facilities. I know many people using SPlus that wont 
change to R because they would have difficulties to find equivalent 
functions. They dont know the poweR!
It would be very great to have a portal that allows a quick access to all 
the available documentation/stuff about R.
For the students here, I also prepared a support page allowing to search 
across R functions (R Help Center: 
http://www.stat.ucl.ac.be/ISdidactique/Rhelp/).
I created a FileMaker database containing more than 11000 functions (name, 
description, library and code). Doing research on the code and having the 
possibility to browse it is very usefull. Nervertheless, I dont think I 
will have time to update it on a regular basis.
Thus, my suggestion is to add function's code to your search engine. If I 
understand well what you use, for that, you will have to generate a flat 
file for each function. If you are interestd, I have pieces of code that 
could do the stuff.

Eric

At 00:58 2/12/2003, Jonathan Baron wrote:
>My search site, http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu, has had several
>problems recently, all my fault, for which I apologize.  But it
>now seems to be running reliably, on a new computer that is much
>faster than the old one.
>It uses htdig to permit search of the Rhelp mailing list, R
>documents, R functions, and various combinations of these.
>Search has several options, including Boolean search (with AND,
>etc.).
>Suggestions are welcome.
>--
>Jonathan Baron, Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
>Home page:            http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron



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L'erreur est certes humaine, mais un vrai désastre
nécessite un ou deux ordinateurs. Citation anonyme
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Eric Lecoutre
Informaticien/Statisticien
Institut de Statistique / UCL

TEL (+32)(0)10473050       lecoutre at stat.ucl.ac.be
URL http://www.stat.ucl.ac.be/ISpersonnel/lecoutre