>>>>> "DM" == Duncan Murdoch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >>>>> on Sat, 26 Apr 2008 17:21:06 -0400 writes:
DM> On 25/04/2008 2:47 PM, Prof Brian Ripley wrote: >> On Fri, 25 Apr 2008, Deepayan Sarkar wrote: >> >>> For what it's worth, I use ?foo mostly to look up usage of functions >>> that I know I want to use, and find it perfect for that (one benefit >>> over help() is that completion works for ?). The only thing I miss is >>> the ability to do the equivalent of help("foo", package = "bar"); >>> ?bar::foo gives the help page for "::". Perhaps that would be >>> something to consider for addition. >> >> That fits most naturally with the (somewhat technical) idea that bar::foo >> becomes a symbol and not a function call. I believe that several of think >> that is in principle a better idea, but no one has as yet (AFAIK) explored >> the ramifications. >> >> However, 5 mins looking at the sources suggests that it is easy to do. DM> And you already did. Thanks! indeed. DM> I'm going to make the following change soon (in R-devel). DM> ??foo DM> will now be like help.search("foo"). This will work with your change, DM> so ??utils::foo will limit the search to the utils package. This is DM> also quite easy. A more difficult thing I'd like to do is to broaden DM> the search to look outside the man pages, but that's a lot harder, and I DM> haven't started on it. DM> I will also follow Hadley's suggestion and change the format of the DM> help.search results, so you can just cut and paste after a question mark DM> to look up the particular topic, e.g. ??foo gives DM> utils::citEntry Writing Package CITATION Files DM> Type '?PKG::FOO' to inspect entry 'PKG::FOO TITLE'. DM> I haven't touched the case of ?foo failing; I'll want to try it for a DM> while to decide whether I like it best as is: >> ?foo DM> No documentation for 'foo' in specified packages and libraries: DM> you could try '??foo' DM> or whether it should just automatically call help.search, or something DM> in between. Please the former, at least by default! [The case of 1500 installed packages was mentioned before...] Note one thing that hasn't been mentioned before: help() has had the optional argument ' try.all.packages = getOption("help.try.all.packages") ' for many years now, and I have been involved in its history as well but don't recall all details. IIRC, help() {and hence "?"} used to *default* to 'try.all.packages = TRUE' for a while and later it was the default for me (and our whole statistics departmental unit). But we found that it *was* inconvenient that a big search was started, often just because of a typo. So I think ?<non-existing> should ``answer quickly'' by default. Martin Maechler DM> Duncan Murdoch ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel