[R] Glossay of available R functions

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Mon, 30 Jan 2006, Patricia J. Hawkins wrote:

>>>>>> "ASA" == Alexandre Santos Aguiar <asaguiar at spsconsultoria.com> writes:
>
> ASA> I am new to R and read this list to learn. It is amazing how
> ASA> frequently new functions pop in messages. Useful and timesaving
> ASA> functions like subset (above) must be documented somewhere.
>
> ASA> Is there a glossary of functions?
>
> I'm also new to R, and was wondering the same thing.  Took a bunch of
> tries, but if you run start.help() and then choose Packages, then
> Base, you will get the list of functions.

You get a list of objects (not just functions) in the base package.  You 
can also get a list by library(help=base).

However, that is far from all the functions available in base R.
As a quick check

as.matrix(sapply(search(), function(x) length(ls(x, all=TRUE))))

.GlobalEnv           0
package:methods    299
package:stats      497
package:graphics    79
package:grDevices   78
package:utils      152
package:datasets   103
Autoloads            1
package:base      1090

so it is less than half the objects loaded and visible in a default 
session.  And there are another 18 packages shipped with R.

Looking at a list of 2300 objects is daunting, and so we provide 
search facilities (including via the HTML pages).

> As a newcomer, I hesitate to suggest this, but maybe there should be a
> comment on the index page to that effect?

Which index page?  If you mean that given by help.start(), it is not a 
common request, and search is linked from there.

-- 
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