From seth at userprimary.net  Thu Nov 12 03:49:12 2009
From: seth at userprimary.net (Seth Falcon)
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:49:12 -0800
Subject: [Rd] typo in docs for unlink()
In-Reply-To: <4AFA93B1.6050508@stats.uwo.ca>
References: <4AFA350D.7060303@acm.org> <4AFA3AA7.8080104@acm.org>
	<4AFA93B1.6050508@stats.uwo.ca>
Message-ID: <4AFB77A8.30802@userprimary.net>

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.

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



[Rd] typo in docs for unlink()
Seth Falcon