RFC: What should ?foo do?
On Fri, 25 Apr 2008, Deepayan Sarkar wrote:
For what it's worth, I use ?foo mostly to look up usage of functions
that I know I want to use, and find it perfect for that (one benefit
over help() is that completion works for ?). The only thing I miss is
the ability to do the equivalent of help("foo", package = "bar");
?bar::foo gives the help page for "::". Perhaps that would be
something to consider for addition.
That fits most naturally with the (somewhat technical) idea that bar::foo becomes a symbol and not a function call. I believe that several of think that is in principle a better idea, but no one has as yet (AFAIK) explored the ramifications. However, 5 mins looking at the sources suggests that it is easy to do.
Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595