Help for methods

But you also have to be able to identify if it is a S3 function or an
S4 method (or an ordinary function).

Why not just type ?summary, which as I said, does tell you up front?

If R can save the novice user a couple of steps in their search for
help, why not do it?

Getting documentation on what the summary of an mle object does is
another example.  I tried:

 * summary.mle and summary.mle-class (of course I knew those wouldn't
work, but nothing in the documentation of mle suggests that it
wouldn't)

 * mle?summary and then summary?mle in case I had gotten it back to front

 * I finally run the example in mle and used ?summary(fit)

The reason I find this so much of a problem is that when you are
teaching R, one of the first things you want to do is teach your
students how to use help.  However, you can't teach them to use it
effectively until they know an awful lot about how the call semantics
of R.

In many years of teaching S/R I have not found that to be a problem.

In my one year of teaching R I have.  How do you teach people how to use help?

Hadley