[stats-rosuda-devel] Problem with JGR. Was: Re: Using help()
On Jan 25, 2009, at 9:35 , Michael Kubovy wrote:
Dear Friends, Thanks to Rolf Turner, Brian Ripley and Patrick Burns for their answers.They don't quite resolve the problem, which I now realize is due to non-standard behavior of JGR, at least on my machine (I verified that Mac GUI works entirely as expected): **** My installation******************** Running the JGR GUI:
sessionInfo()
R version 2.8.1 (2008-12-22) i386-apple-darwin8.11.1 locale: C/C/en_US/C/C/C attached base packages: [1] grid stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods [8] base other attached packages: [1] JGR_1.6-2 iplots_1.1-2 JavaGD_0.5-2 rJava_0.6-1 [5] MASS_7.2-45 lattice_0.17-20 loaded via a namespace (and not attached): [1] tools_2.8.1 ********What happens with "?" and "??" **************
"?" is interpreted by JGR (re-mapped to internal call to help followed by help.search if no topics were found) instead of R. So JGR is smarter than R used to be, but that has changed in R 2.8. Unfortunately R has currently no publicly available API to support what the Mac-GUI does, because it uses a nasty trick by modifying R's sources to hook inside R. I'm working on fixing this for R 2.9.0-to- be, but currently JGR is out of luck and has to rely on its own attempts to parse the command line, so the results will vary until then.
If I type "?normal" I get the long list, not "No documentation
found." When I type "?plot" I get the help page for plot {JM}, and
not plot.default {graphics}; when I type ?dnorm I get a rather long
list of help pages.
If I type "??normal"
I get
?normal.htm
.com.symantec.APSock
.com.symantec.aptmp
.DM_1039:1232634821l:DlnIrq
.DM_11869:1232818209l:m4AGyL
.DM_13345:1232655220l:C1js39
.DM_14309:1232822090l:e6wvqw
.DM_15688:1232659145l:ffZvPg
.DM_16640:1232825979l:n5TrAz
.DM_18040:1232662823l:Gb81yX
?
******** Another JGR problem **************
Help pages for newly installed packages are accessible only after
JGR is restarted.
I can see what could cause that, but in theory that should affect all html-based systems if R really doesn't update the links. I didn't actually look but it's possible that JGR just needs to call make.packages.html() -- in effect, try calling that function and if that solves your problem that's what's it is ... Cheers, S
Thanks, MK On Jan 24, 2009, at 8:54 PM, Rolf Turner wrote:
On 25/01/2009, at 2:33 PM, Michael Kubovy wrote:
? (1) If I type ?normal because I forgot the name dnorm() I get a long list of relevant pages. Getting to right page is laborious. (2) If I remember dnorm() and want to be reminded of the call, I also get a list of pages. ?
? If you type ``?normal'' you get a ``No documentation found'' message. If you type ``??normal'' you indeed get a long list of pages, some of which might be relevant. (If you want help on ``dnorm'' then the relevant page is stats::Normal. And then typing ``?Normal'' gets you what you want. Which is somewhat on the obscure side of obvious, IMHO.) If you type ``?dnorm'' then you get exactly what you want immediately. Exactly? Well, there's also info on pnorm, qnorm, and rnorm, but I expect you can live with that. ? Rolf Turner
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