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.
cheers,
Rolf Turner
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