Another wishlist for R
Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
On Mon, 26 Jan 2004, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
On 26 Jan 2004 15:17:01 +0100, Peter Dalgaard <p.dalgaard@biostat.ku.dk> wrote :
Either setup so that cat() will be used to print it (add class + print
method) or return noquote(....) The latter will give this effect:
noquote("function (x, y = NULL, type = \"p\", xlim = NULL, ylim = NULL, ")
[1] function (x, y = NULL, type = "p", xlim = NULL, ylim = NULL,
i.e. include line numbers.
I think this produces a nice display:
tail.function
function (x, n = 6) {
lines <- matrix(deparse(x),ncol=1)
I would just use as.matrix(deparse(x)).
rownames(lines) <- 1:nrow(lines) colnames(lines) <- '' noquote(tail(lines,n=n)) }
tail(plot.default)
36 box(...) 37 if (ann) 38 title(main = main, sub = sub, xlab = xlab, ylab = ylab, 39 ...) 40 invisible() 41 } Unfortunately, I doubt if people would really want the result to be a matrix, so maybe a new class is what is needed.
I knew this happened, but I did not know what people wanted. I can only see this being used interactively (it at all: I would use page), so that seems as good as any.
I like Duncan's idea. I doubt I have ever used head on a function for real, but tail of a function can be handy for seeing the structure of the return value. I agree that this is only likely to be used interactively. Pat