Simple suggestion for improvement

Hello,

Being relatively new to R, I often find myself searching for functions 
using help.search("term"). Why not have the command ??term invoke it in 
the same way as ?topic invokes index.search("topic")? Using a double 
question mark to invoke a wider search for a term seems relatively 
intuitive to me, and presumably would be trivial to implement.

That's not a bad suggestion, but it might not be trivial to implement.
Right now the "?" is an operator that is parsed like other operators
such as "+":  it becomes a function call . To have "??" mean something
special would mean changes to the parser, or a special case to the
.helpForCall function that the "?" function calls.

On 3 Mar 2005, at 10:08, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

That's not a bad suggestion, but it might not be trivial to implement.
Right now the "?" is an operator that is parsed like other operators
such as "+":  it becomes a function call . To have "??" mean something
special would mean changes to the parser, or a special case to the
.helpForCall function that the "?" function calls.

OK, I can see that. Adding another operator might be seen as too great 
a change to consider "trivial". But the second way (changing the 
function) seems a little "hacky" to me. Anyway, it is just a suggestion 
that would save me (and others) some typing time.

Thanks for replying to my original post,

Yan

How will you deal with multiple word searches such as

	help.search("eps dev")

One way to implement would be ??"eps dev" but this looks awkward to me.