Paul,

I agree completely.  I didn't come at this with a programming background,
and I never noticed the other plot links, or understood their importance.
The "plot" help page was one of the first help pages I ever looked at and I
remember that It was totally confusing.  In fact, help pages like that
essentially trained me to ignore most of the text in the help pages.
Ignoring the help was a good survival tactic until I understood the R
language better and grew accustomed to the jargon.

Maybe it would be better if the plot help page just informed you that it's a
convenience function and listed links to common plot calls, like
"plot.function" or even "plot.lm", and talked more about "par" and "curve"

R is great for the people who use it, but it's really hard to build up to
the point where you're a user!

On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 5:31 PM, Paul Menzel <
paulepanter@users.sourceforge.net> wrote:

> Am Mittwoch, den 27.07.2011, 18:04 -0400 schrieb David Winsemius:
> > On Jul 27, 2011, at 5:53 PM, Paul Menzel wrote:
>
> > > as `plot.function` is not explicitly mentioned in `?plot`.
> >
> > Right, but the fact that it _is_ described as a "generic" function
> > will tell the clueful that other methods other than the default method
> > may exist, and that their availability may vary with which packages
> > are loaded.
>
> Of course, when you know what to do it is clear where to look. I just
> want to offer a view point from a beginner and adding that little
> comment would have saved me half an hour. (Because searching for »r
> plotting function« did not result in good hits.)
>
> > > One further comment regarding the examples in `?plot.function`. Trying
> > > those in order
> > >
> > >        op <- par(mfrow = c(2, 2))
> > >        chippy <- function(x) sin(cos(x)*exp(-x/2))
> > >        plot (chippy, -8, -5)
> > >        for(ll in c("", "x", "y", "xy"))
> > >        curve(log(1+x), 1, 100, log = ll,
> > >              sub = paste("log= '", ll, "'", sep = ""))
> > >        par(op)
> > >
> > > I do not see any effect executing `par(op)` at the end. Reading `?
> > > par` I
> > > assume it should go before the for loop?
> >
> > No. Read:
> >
> > ?par
> >
> > It has both a value and a side-effect. Pay particular attention to its
> > value for its first invocation. Then think about why its side-effect
> > is what you want _after_ the loop. Then you may understand what is
> > happening.  Report back to the class. (This isn't in the Introductory
> > material you are reading?)
>
> I messed up and somehow missed to execute `op <- par(mfrow = c(2, 2))`
> when first running the examples and jumped to wrong conclusion. I am
> sorry for the noise.
>
>
> Thank you for your patience and help,
>
> Paul
>
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