Message-ID: <f8e6ff050804242123k76122d5cj94f0790cba4ca905@mail.gmail.com>
Date: 2008-04-25T04:23:50Z
From: Hadley Wickham
Subject: RFC: What should ?foo do?
In-Reply-To: <48115131.7000402@comcast.net>
> 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
--
http://had.co.nz/