[R] Function hints

[hadley wickham]

> what I really would love to see would be an improved help.search():
> on r-devel I found a reference to the /concept tag in .Rd files and the
> fact that it is rarely used (again: I was not aware of this :-( ...),
> which might serve as keyword container suitable for improving
> help.search() results. what about changing the syntax here to something like
> \concept {
>     keyword = score,
>     keyword = score
>     ...
> }
> where score would be restricted to a small range of values (say, 1-3 or
> 1-5). if package maintainer then would choose a handful of sensible
> keywords (and scores) for a package and its functions one could expect
> improved search results. this might be a naive idea, but could a
> sort-by-relevance in the help.search() output profit from this?

This is not something I think you can solve automatically.  Good
keywording requries a lot of effort, and needs to be consistent to be
useful.  The only way to achieve consistency is to have only person
keywording (difficult/expensive), or exhaustively document the process
of keywording and then require all package authors to read and use
(impossible).

Hadley