Glossay of available R functions

"PBR" == Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> writes:

commenting that subset was new to him, though he did say "list of
functions in R".  I'd searched through everything _else_ in the help
system looking for such a glossary; I hadn't thought to look under
*Packages*, as those are, of course, add-ons.

PBR> `Of course' is incorrect here.  Everything in R is in a package.

Just my thinking at the time; once I realized that everything in R is
a package, it occurred to me to look under the "packages" heading.
But that was after reading the R Language Reference Manual, and
working through a good bit of the Introduction To R.

So a comment such as "For an index of R basic objects, see the
'base' package under *Packages*" on the help.start() index page
would be helpful.

PBR> But (as I originally pointed out), that is not a correct
PBR> interpretation of `basic'.  It might have been in R 1.8.0, but
PBR> the 'base' package is now intended to support only some scripting
PBR> operations (where speed is essential so it is minimal).  Unlike
PBR> Python, R is not primarily a scripting language.

Oh -- I understand; thank you.  In retrospect, I was looking for the
things clueless (or cluefull) newcomers should be familiar with before
coming and bothering R-help with clueless newcomer questions.

I didn't mean to try your patience -- just to suggest a couple of
links in the documentation so that well-written information that
exists, and that *ought* to hit newcomers like a brick, would in fact
hit us like a brick.

PBR> The analogue of the Python Standard Library is I think the
PBR> standard packages.

Thank you!  That's helpful.

Patricia J. Hawkins
Hawkins Internet Applications
www.hawkinsia.com
"blundering through software language manuals since 1979"