From h.wickham at gmail.com  Fri Apr 25 06:23:50 2008
From: h.wickham at gmail.com (hadley wickham)
Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2008 23:23:50 -0500
Subject: [Rd] RFC: What should ?foo do?
In-Reply-To: <48115131.7000402@comcast.net>
References: <48110D8B.10300@stats.uwo.ca> <48115131.7000402@comcast.net>
Message-ID: <f8e6ff050804242123k76122d5cj94f0790cba4ca905@mail.gmail.com>

>  I am not convinced that ?foo should do this however. help("foo")
>  conceptually seems predicated upon the notion that a user is looking for
>  a reference/help page for a specific function or descriptor called
>  'foo'. The user knows the name of the function or descriptor and should
>  not have to wait for a search function to locate it or conceptually

Is that true?  That does limit the usefulness of ? as it implies that
you must already know the function that you need.

>  related terms. If the user has a large number of CRAN packages
>  installed, such a search can take a rather long time. That's an issue
>  for example with help.search().

But that's just a problem with the current implementation.  Better
indexing could make full text search of all documentation practical
instantaneous.  This is one argument for a centralised documentation
web site - such indices are much easier to set up in a modern web
development environment.  I could imagine this being an eventual
feature of crantastic.org, but it requires on some tool to turn Rd
files into a form more easily parsed with off-the-shelf tools (ideally
xml).

Hadley

-- 
http://had.co.nz/



[Rd] RFC: What should ?foo do?
hadley wickham