From ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk  Fri Apr 25 20:47:37 2008
From: ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk (Prof Brian Ripley)
Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2008 19:47:37 +0100 (BST)
Subject: [Rd] RFC: What should ?foo do?
In-Reply-To: <eb555e660804251054kaabb1c4r237007ff5703ca5f@mail.gmail.com>
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	<481202A4.2030508@comcast.net>
	<eb555e660804251054kaabb1c4r237007ff5703ca5f@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.1.10.0804251931290.23000@gannet.stats.ox.ac.uk>

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.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595



[Rd] RFC: What should ?foo do?
Prof Brian Ripley