Documenting classes and methods: was [Rd] Re: R-devel Digest, Vol 3, Issue 23

Might it be an idea to make "?" a special operator akin to "+" or "[", R
users could then write their own help functions - may be even making "?"

generic? With the proposed xml help system one could imagine quite
sophisticated context sensitive help systems.

Regards,

John Marsland

PS this has been a very useful debate for those of us enthusiastically using
S4 methods.

-----Original Message-----
From: Duncan Murdoch [mailto:dmurdoch@pair.com]
Sent: 12 June 2003 18:54
To: Kurt.Hornik@wu-wien.ac.at
Cc: r-devel@stat.math.ethz.ch; Gordon Smyth; John Chambers
Subject: Re: Documenting classes and methods: was [Rd] Re: R-devel
Digest, Vol 3, Issue 23


On Mon, 9 Jun 2003 09:32:39 +0200, you wrote in message
<16100.14359.920512.374624@mithrandir.hornik.net>:

Re using 'foo-methods' as an alias, I am not sure whether this is
necessary in the long run.  To find out which methods are

available, we

can use showMethod().  We should eventually [see below] be able to do
something like

 method ? f(x="character", y = "numeric")

to access the documentation object for the given signature,

and there is

no guarantee that an f-methods Rd object really documents all methods
for the generic f in the package.  So I think eventually we

should get

rid of the default foo-methods alias, and just dump the ones
corresponding to available methods.

I hope that at this point we also implement

 ?f(x,y)

at this point, to give the same result (where x and y are existing
objects of classes "character" and "numeric", respectively).

Duncan Murdoch

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