Help for methods
On Tue, 19 Sep 2006, hadley wickham wrote:
You are supposed to do: ?summary.lm ?summary.data.frame for S3 methods. The former works, the latter doesn't - which is
?summary.data.frame does work on my systems.
probably considered a bug, but then the usage of some of the generics are probably considered obvious and fundamental enough that summary.data.frame doesn't really behave in any substantially different way compared to what is said in ?summary and ?Summary .
Well, I know that, and you know that, but how is anyone supposed to figure it out? It means that you need to have a working knowledge of the S3 and S4 class systems before you can use the help to reliably get the documentation you need.
For S3 you do to understand that there are different methods, and it is in `An Introduction to R'. And ?summary reminds you.
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