From h.wickham at gmail.com  Fri Apr 25 16:52:37 2008
From: h.wickham at gmail.com (hadley wickham)
Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2008 09:52:37 -0500
Subject: [Rd] RFC: What should ?foo do?
In-Reply-To: <4811ED2A.1070709@stats.uwo.ca>
References: <48110D8B.10300@stats.uwo.ca> <48115131.7000402@comcast.net>
	<4811B9EC.3010701@stats.uwo.ca> <4811D298.4030102@biostat.ku.dk>
	<f8e6ff050804250718u6cc654cboe02f3071c6d9cb24@mail.gmail.com>
	<4811ED2A.1070709@stats.uwo.ca>
Message-ID: <f8e6ff050804250752i589ac592j28aa42e2ce8acff@mail.gmail.com>

>  Consistent with this idea would be something like the "I feel lucky" search
> on Google, i.e. ?foo would go immediately to the best match, while ??foo
> would present a list of possible matches.  This is not consistent with
> current behaviour, where ?foo will present a list if it matches two or more
> topics, but I think we can always rank one ahead of the other based on their
> ordering in the search list.  I don't know if it will be so easy to rank
> hits coming from help.search(), or from other searches that don't exist yet:
> but maybe it doesn't matter.  If someone doesn't like what they get from
> ?foo, they can always try ??foo.

That seems like a good compromise to me - it's a metaphor familiar to
most people, and corresponds roughly to the current behaviour of help
and help.search.

Hadley

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



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