[R] ?for

Ray Brownrigg ray at mcs.vuw.ac.nz
Fri Nov 21 03:42:44 CET 2003


> I thought I was getting to grips with it, until last reply from Prof Brian
> Ripley's. At least in my Windows and Linux boxes

Actually it was my reply that suggested ?paste("help")

> ? paste("help")
> opens the help for help (!?)

Not on my systems! [Solaris, NetBSD, Windows 98].  I believe it should
open the help for paste().

The point is that it requires a syntactically correct statement after
the ? so that the command parses correctly (with ? as a unary
operator), but the result is to provide the help for the first
syntactic element of the parsed expression, *without* evaluating the expression.

Ray Brownrigg




More information about the R-help mailing list