[R] suggestions motivated by quest for remainders

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Mon, 30 Aug 2004, Ben Wittner wrote:

> Some time ago I tried to find out how to compute remainders in R.
> I now know that it is done with %%, which is documented in help('+'),
> but before someone told me that I tried:
>   help('remainder'), help.search('remainder'), apropos('remainder')
>   help('modulo'), help.search('modulo'), and apropos('modulo')
> all of which yielded nothing.
> I then tried help.search('mod') which yielded many pages of output, none
> of which seemed to be relevant to remainders.
> 
> 1) Easy to implement small suggestion:
> Add 'remainder' and 'modulus' as aliases to the help page for '+'.

We have \concept's for that, and I have added those.  But is hard to know 
what people are going to choose to search on.

> 2) Hard to implement suggestion:
> Add full-text search options to help.search(). If that were the case, 
> help.search('mod') would have yielded '+' among its pages of output.

It's Arithmetic, not +, that comes up.

> I believe this would be very helpful in various situations (e.g., when
> trying to find out how to set xlim).

We do already have full-text-search on Windows CHM help, unfortunately
per-package.  If you try it you will find it does not work for your
suggested keywords, and you would be swamped by help.search('mod').

As ever, 

	R is a collaborative project with many contributors.

and it is open to you to contribute FTS extensions to help.search.
With 2.0.0 about to go into its final phases and needing all packages to 
be re-installed, now would be a very good time to do this.

-- 
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 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595