From ray at ganymede.org  Sun May 20 03:03:21 2007
From: ray at ganymede.org (ray at ganymede.org)
Date: Sun, 20 May 2007 03:03:21 +0200 (CEST)
Subject: [Rd] section needed in FAQ - Using R (PR#9698)
Message-ID: <20070520010321.7689F23202@slim.kubism.ku.dk>

Full_Name: Ray Kiddy
Version: R 2.5.0 GUI 1.19 (4308)
OS: Mac OS X 10.4.9
Submission from: (NULL) (71.139.33.60)



There is no section in the FAQ equivalent to "Using R". The "R Basics" is too
basic. I would say it addresses "meta-R" questions, such as installing.

I had a FAQ that I would think would be a basic "Using R" question, namely: "How
does one generate random numbers?". It is actually non-trivial to answer this if
one is new to R, as there are too many hits for "Random" and they dive too
deeply.

My answer to this FAQ would be:

In order to generate random numbers, there are "r" methods for every
distribution. Distributions include Uniform (runif), Binomial (rbinom), Normal
(rnorm), Cauchy (rcauchy), Chi Square (rchisq), Exponential (rexp), Gamma
(rgamma), and many more.

By the way, the R program itself is really badly in need of an "appropos()" to
go alongside "help()". Perhaps "help()" can be renamed to "hunt()" or
"huntAndPeck()".



[Rd] section needed in FAQ - Using R (PR#9698)
ray at ganymede.org