RFC: What should ?foo do?
I am not convinced that ?foo should do this however. help("foo")
conceptually seems predicated upon the notion that a user is looking for
a reference/help page for a specific function or descriptor called
'foo'. The user knows the name of the function or descriptor and should
not have to wait for a search function to locate it or conceptually
Is that true? That does limit the usefulness of ? as it implies that you must already know the function that you need.
related terms. If the user has a large number of CRAN packages installed, such a search can take a rather long time. That's an issue for example with help.search().
But that's just a problem with the current implementation. Better indexing could make full text search of all documentation practical instantaneous. This is one argument for a centralised documentation web site - such indices are much easier to set up in a modern web development environment. I could imagine this being an eventual feature of crantastic.org, but it requires on some tool to turn Rd files into a form more easily parsed with off-the-shelf tools (ideally xml). Hadley