[R] Block comments in R?

Gabor Grothendieck ggrothendieck at gmail.com
Mon Oct 9 16:39:42 CEST 2006


On 10/9/06, hadley wickham <h.wickham at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Current .Rd documentation has some obvious problems:
> >
> > - the parser strips comments out of examples when it runs them
> > - there's no way to put images into the documentation
> > - the keywords aren't much use
> > - there's isn't a definition anywhere of what the format really is, so
> > it's hard to know
> > whether something will work other than by trying it -- and it may break
> > with the next release.
> > - there's no way to link from a help man page to a vignette or other
> > form of documentation.
>
> The main thing I don't like about the current system is the amount of
> duplication - you have to supply a lot of information in the
> documentation that is also encoded in the function (ie. everything in
> the codoc check).  This makes it unnecessarily painful when updating
> documentation to reflect minor changes.  The large distance between
> code and documentation also makes it easy to forget to update the
> documentation when changing the code.  These are things that are
> helped by inline documentation (which I am using)
>
> Hadley

The biggest problem I find with the current system is that the error
or warning messages in R CMD check often leave you without a good
idea of where the problem occurred and one is left removing half
the package and dividing successively until its found.



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