From hadley at rice.edu  Mon Oct 31 00:01:05 2011
From: hadley at rice.edu (Hadley Wickham)
Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2011 10:01:05 +1100
Subject: [Rd] Small feature request for help(package = ...)
Message-ID: <CABdHhvFtBYAdNQQ84a+K8tZyjic8ayWy-4hLEff3rWuA2aJRMg@mail.gmail.com>

Currently help(package = S4) looks like:

coef-methods            Methods for Function 'coef' in Package 'stats4'
confint-methods         Methods for Function 'confint' in Package
                        'stats4'
logLik-methods          Methods for Function 'logLik' in Package
                        'stats4'
mle                     Maximum Likelihood Estimation
mle-class               Class '"mle"' for Results of Maximum Likelihood
                        Estimation

I think it would be more useful if it looked like:

methods?coef            Methods for Function 'coef' in Package 'stats4'
methods?confint         Methods for Function 'confint' in Package
                        'stats4'
methods?logLik          Methods for Function 'logLik' in Package
                        'stats4'
?mle                     Maximum Likelihood Estimation
class?mle               Class '"mle"' for Results of Maximum Likelihood
                        Estimation

And similarly help(package = base) could have

?":"                       Colon Operator
?"::"                      Double Colon and Triple Colon Operators
?"@"                       Extract Slots
?Arithmetic              Arithmetic Operators


That would make help just a little bit easier to use for the newcomer.
 What do you think?

Hadley

-- 
Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair
Department of Statistics / Rice University
http://had.co.nz/



[Rd] Small feature request for help(package = ...)
Hadley Wickham