[R] ?for

[Marc Schwartz]

On Mon, 2003-11-17 at 14:27, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> Well ^C or ESC (on Windows GUI) is the answer I would give.
> 
> On Tue, 18 Nov 2003, Ray Brownrigg wrote:
> 
> > Peter Dalgaard <p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk> writes:
> > > 
> > > Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> writes:
> > > 
> > > > You have typed a syntactically incomplete statement: this is explained in 
> > > > ?help.
> > > > 
> > > > Hint: ?"for" and help("for") work.
> > > 
> > > [Original question added back in:
> > > On Sun, 16 Nov 2003, Angel wrote:
> > > 
> > > > I have always been intrigued by why ?for (or ?if,?while,etc) leave R
> > > > wanting for more:
> > > > > ?for
> > > > +
> > > > I know the help for these is in ?Control, but I sometimes make the
> > > > mistake of typing ?for instead. What is R expecting me to say to finish
> > > > the statement?
> > > ]
> > > Further hint: ? is an operator, syntactically similar to + and -. You
> > > can apply operators to the result of a for loop. Consider for example
> > > 
> > > x <- 1; - for (i in 1:10) x <- x * i
> > > 
> > > (? has special semantics, but that is not noticed at parse time).
> > > 
> > Unfortunately the original question still hasn't been answered
> > explicitly, not even in ?help.
> > Try:
> > > ?for
> > + (i in 0) 0
> > or:
> > > ?if
> > + (T) T
> > or:
> > > ?+
> > + 0
> > 
> > So you have to provide the rest of a syntactically complete statement.
> > 
> > Just to see if you now understand exactly how ? works, what do you
> > think:
> > ? paste("help")
> > will do?
> > 
> > Ray Brownrigg


R 1.8.1 Beta using gnome-terminal on Fedora Core 1 gives:

> ? paste("help")
help() for paste  is shown in browser /usr/bin/mozilla ...
Use      help( paste , htmlhelp=FALSE)
or       options(htmlhelp = FALSE)
to revert.


However, using ESS with emacs on the same platform gives:

> ? paste("help")

Error in help("paste(", htmlhelp = FALSE) : 
	No documentation for 'paste(' in specified packages and libraries:
  you could try 'help.search("paste(")'


:-)

Marc