[R] Hiding information about functions in newly developed packages

[Peter Dalgaard]

Tudor Bodea wrote:
> Dear UseRs:
>
> I intend to write a package to handle the basic operations a revenue management
> analyst has to deal with on a regular basis (e.g., demand untruncation,
> capacity allocation, pricing decisions, etc.).  Following the directions posted
> by Peter Rossi (Making R Packages under Windows: A Tutorial, January 2006) I
> was able to build an interim package that currently consists of one simple
> function (e.g., fun).  After the package is loaded and the function is invoked
> without any parameters (e.g., > fun) the body of the function is displayed on
> the screen underneath the function call.  Since the user does not need to know
> the internal structure of the function, I am wondering if there is a way to
> hide this information. I have looked into some of the material that Paul
> Murrell and John Chambers among others posted but I have not really understood
> how to incorporate this information into the package building process.  If you
> already experienced this issue and have some useful suggestions, I would really
> appreciate your taking the time to share them with me.  For this project, I am
> using R2.7.1 on a Windows XP machine.
>   
A simple way is

 > print.invisible <- function(x) cat("Printing disabled\n")
 > class(ls) <- "invisible"
 > ls
Printing disabled

Of course, unclass(ls) still shows the definition, but I assume that the 
purpose was never to hide the progamming, just to avoid confusing users. 
Also of course, the same thing applies to all other functions in the 
system....

And, btw, "fun" is not "invoking the function without parameters", that 
would be "fun()". Typing the name is a request to see the function object.

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