From murdoch at stats.uwo.ca  Thu Nov 12 04:21:33 2009
From: murdoch at stats.uwo.ca (Duncan Murdoch)
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 2009 22:21:33 -0500
Subject: [Rd] typo in docs for unlink()
In-Reply-To: <4AFB77A8.30802@userprimary.net>
References: <4AFA350D.7060303@acm.org>
	<4AFA3AA7.8080104@acm.org>	<4AFA93B1.6050508@stats.uwo.ca>
	<4AFB77A8.30802@userprimary.net>
Message-ID: <4AFB7F3D.5020206@stats.uwo.ca>

On 11/11/2009 9:49 PM, Seth Falcon wrote:
> 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.

As I said, I don't think that's hard to implement, but it's hard to 
design.  If you want to put together what the output (say in HTML) 
should look like for unlink, I'll let you know whether the 
implementation is really as easy as I think it will be.

Duncan Murdoch

> 
> 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
> 
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[Rd] typo in docs for unlink()
Duncan Murdoch