Function hints

For me, it's been extremely helpful to keep function & documentation
together during editing-- it greatly increases the chance that I will
actually update the doco when I change the code, rather than putting it
off until I've forgotten what I did. Also, writing Rd format is a
nightmare (again, personal opinion)-- being able to write plain-text
makes the whole documentation thing bearable.

The above is not quite to the point of the original post, I think, which
talks about storing the documentation as commented bits *inside* the
function code. However, I'm not sure the latter is really desirable;
there is some merit in forcing authors to write an explicit "Details" or
"Description" section that is not just a paraphrase of programming
comments, and such sections are unlikely to fit easily inside code. At
any rate, I wouldn't want to have to interpret my *own* programming
comments as a usage guide!

WRTO automatic "usage" sections: it is easy to write code to do this
('prompt', and there is also some in 'mvbutils'-- not sure if it's in
the current release though) but at least as far as the "usage" section
goes, I think people should be "vigorously encouraged" to write their
own, showing as far as possible how one might actually *use* the
function. For many functions, just duplicating the argument list is not
helpful to the user-- a function can often be invoked in several
different ways, with different arguments relevant to different
invocations. I think it's good to show how this can be done in the

My general point here is: the documentating process should be as
painless as possible, but not more so. Defaults that are likely to lead
to unhelpful documentation are perhaps best avoided.
For this general reason, I applaud R's fairly rigid documentation
standards, even though I frequently curse them. (And I would like to see
some bits more rigid, such as compulsory "how-to-use-this" documentation
for each package!)