In the same way,
the R index could provide a list of terms that overlap the given
search term. For example if we search for "goodness of fit", then
"hypothesis test" might be one of the related terms that pops up.
No, I'm not volunteering to build the system.
Patrick Burns
Burns Statistics
patrick at burns-stat.com
+44 (0)20 8525 0696
http://www.burns-stat.com
(home of S Poetry and "A Guide for the Unwilling S User")
John Fox wrote:
Dear Duncan,
I don't think that there is an automatic, nearly costless
an effective solution to locating R resources. The problem
analogous to indexing a book. There's an excellent
process *should* look like in the Chicago Manual of Style,
work. In my experience, most book indexes are quite poor,
generated indexes, while not useless, are even worse, since
concepts, not words. The ideal indexer is therefore the
I guess that the question boils down to how important is it
analogue of a good index to R? As I said in a previous
that the current search facilities work pretty well -- about
could expect of an automatic approach. I don't believe that
effective centralized solution, so doing something more
currently available implies farming out the process to
course, there's no guarantee that all package authors will
indexers.
Regards,
John
--------------------------------
John Fox
Department of Sociology
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario
Canada L8S 4M4
905-525-9140x23604
http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox
--------------------------------
-----Original Message-----
From: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch
[mailto:r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of
Sent: Monday, November 22, 2004 8:55 AM
To: Cliff Lunneborg
Cc: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
Subject: Re: [R] The hidden costs of GPL software?
On Fri, 19 Nov 2004 13:59:23 -0800, "Cliff Lunneborg"
<cliff at ms.washington.edu> quoted John Fox:
Why not, as previously has been proposed, replace the
(and, in my view, not very useful) set of keywords in R
with the requirement that package authors supply their own
each documented object? I believe that this is the intent of the
concept entries in Rd files, but their use certainly is not
even actively encouraged. (They're just mentioned in
Writing R Extensions manual.
That would not be easy and won't happen quickly. There are some
problems:
- The base packages mostly don't use \concept. (E.g. base
has 365 man pages, only about 15 of them use it). Adding it
to each file is a fairly time-consuming task.
- Before we started, we'd need to agree as to what they are for.
Right now, I think they are mainly used when the name of a
concept doesn't match the name of the function that
implements it, e.g.
"modulo", "remainder", "promise", "argmin", "assertion". The
need for this usage is pretty rare. If they were used for
everything, what would they contain?
- Keywording in a useful way is hard. There are spelling
issues (e.g. optimise versus optimize); our fuzzy matching
helps with those.
But there are also multiple names for the same thing, and
multiple meanings for the same name.
Duncan Murdoch