On 11/11/2009 9:49 PM, Seth Falcon wrote:
On 11/11/09 2:36 AM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
On 10/11/2009 11:16 PM, Tony Plate wrote:
PS, I should have said that I'm reading the docs for unlink in
R-2.10.0 on a Linux system. The docs that appear in a Windows
installation of R are different (the Windows docs do not mention that
not all systems support recursive=TRUE).
Here's a plea for docs to be uniform across all systems! Trying to
write R code that works on all systems is much harder when the docs
are different across systems, and you might only see system specific
notes on a different system than the one you're working on.
That's a good point, but in favour of the current practice, it is very
irritating when searches take you to functions that don't work on your
system.
One thing that might be possible is to render all versions of the help
on all systems, but with some sort of indicator (e.g. a colour change)
to indicate things that don't apply on your system, or only apply on
your system. I think the hardest part of doing this would be designing
the output; actually implementing it would not be so bad.
I would be strongly in favor of a change that provided documentation for
all systems on all systems.
As I said, I don't think that's hard to implement, but it's hard to
design. If you want to put together what the output (say in HTML)
should look like for unlink, I'll let you know whether the
implementation is really as easy as I think it will be.
Duncan Murdoch
Since platform specific behavior for R functions is the exception rather
than the norm, I would imagine that simply displaying doc sections by
platform would be sufficient.
I think the benefit of being able to see what might not work on another
platform far out weighs the inconvenience of finding doc during a search
for something that only works on another platform -- hey, that still
might be useful as it would tell you what platform you should use ;-)
+ seth
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