round() and negative digits
On 11-10-11 7:14 PM, Rolf Turner wrote:
On 11/10/11 08:17, Michael Friendly wrote:
On 10/9/2011 6:18 AM, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
Sometimes it is better not to document things than try to give precise details which may get changed *and* there will be useRs who misread (and maybe even file bug reports on their misreadings). The source is the ultimate documentation.
I can't agree with this less. The source does the computation. The documentation says how to use it and what it should do. Corner cases can be trapped in code or mentioned in Notes. But the source is only useful if you can easily find it and then can understand what it is doing, particularly for a .Primitive like round(). The source is only the documentation of last resort.
I agree. It seems to me that saying that the source is the ultimate documentation is rather like (in pure mathematics) saying that all maths follows from the Zermello-Fraenkel axioms plus the Axiom of Choice, so those axioms are all that we need to tell anyone.
R is an open source project. That means we expect people to look at the source, to answer some of their own questions, to suggest improvements, to point out errors. If you don't look at it, you aren't holding up your side of the bargain. Duncan Murdoch