From ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk  Tue Sep 19 15:02:21 2006
From: ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk (Prof Brian Ripley)
Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2006 14:02:21 +0100 (BST)
Subject: [Rd] Help for methods
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	<450FE1A3.8030808@cimr.cam.ac.uk>
	<f8e6ff050609190552v34d29e95m4c62b9f8c7f3841e@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0609191400350.21406@gannet.stats.ox.ac.uk>

On Tue, 19 Sep 2006, hadley wickham wrote:

>> You are supposed to do:
>>
>> ?summary.lm
>> ?summary.data.frame
>>
>> for S3 methods. The former works, the latter doesn't - which is

?summary.data.frame does work on my systems.

>> probably considered a bug, but then the usage of some of the
>> generics are probably considered obvious and fundamental enough
>> that summary.data.frame doesn't really behave in any substantially
>> different way compared to what is said in ?summary and ?Summary .
>
> Well, I know that, and you know that, but how is anyone supposed to
> figure it out?  It means that you need to have a working knowledge of
> the S3 and S4 class systems before you can use the help to reliably
> get the documentation you need.

For S3 you do to understand that there are different methods, and it 
is in `An Introduction to R'.  And ?summary reminds you.

-- 
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] Help for methods
Prof Brian Ripley