From h.wickham at gmail.com  Tue Sep 19 15:16:13 2006
From: h.wickham at gmail.com (hadley wickham)
Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2006 08:16:13 -0500
Subject: [Rd] Help for methods
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	<450FE1A3.8030808@cimr.cam.ac.uk>
	<f8e6ff050609190552v34d29e95m4c62b9f8c7f3841e@mail.gmail.com>
	<450FEB14.1080409@stats.uwo.ca>
Message-ID: <f8e6ff050609190616h26cf45em427f3ecb8a30ca28@mail.gmail.com>

> In the alpha of 2.4.0, both suggestions above work, as do ?summary and
> ?summary(data.frame()).  ?summary(lm()) gives the same man page, rather
> than the summary.lm page (but the page does have a link to that page).

That's great.

The fact that summary includes a link to summary.lm is relevant for
this specific example, but not in general.

This is also related to my distaste for having multiple methods
documented in one function.  As a developer of R packages, I
understand why people do it (and do it myself), but as a user of help,
it makes the documentation harder to read.

> The problem with S3 methods is that it's pretty difficult for R to know
> that a particular object is an S3 generic.  The only sign is that it has
> a call to UseMethod() in it.  I think this is one of the motivations for S4.

Well, it is even more difficult for a human to know!

Hadley




[Rd] Help for methods
hadley wickham