Having just finished an index I would like to second John's comments. Even as an author, it is difficult to achieve some degree of completeness and consistency.
Of course, maybe a real whizz at clustering could assemble something
very useful quite easily. All of us who have had the frustration of searching
for a forgotten function would be grateful.
url: www.econ.uiuc.edu/~roger Roger Koenker email [EMAIL PROTECTED] Department of Economics vox: 217-333-4558 University of Illinois fax: 217-244-6678 Champaign, IL 61820
On Nov 23, 2004, at 7:48 AM, John Fox wrote:
Dear Duncan,
I don't think that there is an automatic, nearly costless way of providing
an effective solution to locating R resources. The problem seems to me to be
analogous to indexing a book. There's an excellent description of what that
process *should* look like in the Chicago Manual of Style, and it's a lot of
work. In my experience, most book indexes are quite poor, and automatically
generated indexes, while not useless, are even worse, since one should index
concepts, not words. The ideal indexer is therefore the author of the book.
I guess that the question boils down to how important is it to provide an
analogue of a good index to R? As I said in a previous message, I believe
that the current search facilities work pretty well -- about as well as one
could expect of an automatic approach. I don't believe that there's an
effective centralized solution, so doing something more ambitious than is
currently available implies farming out the process to package authors. Of
course, there's no guarantee that all package authors will be diligent
indexers.
Regards, John
-------------------------------- John Fox Department of Sociology McMaster University Hamilton, Ontario Canada L8S 4M4 905-525-9140x23604 http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox --------------------------------
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Duncan Murdoch Sent: Monday, November 22, 2004 8:55 AM To: Cliff Lunneborg Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [R] The hidden costs of GPL software?
On Fri, 19 Nov 2004 13:59:23 -0800, "Cliff Lunneborg" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> quoted John Fox:
documentationWhy not, as previously has been proposed, replace the current static (and, in my view, not very useful) set of keywords in Rwith the requirement that package authors supply their ownkeywords forrequired oreach documented object? I believe that this is the intent of the concept entries in Rd files, but their use certainly is noteven actively encouraged. (They're just mentioned in passing in the Writing R Extensions manual.
That would not be easy and won't happen quickly. There are some problems:
- The base packages mostly don't use \concept. (E.g. base has 365 man pages, only about 15 of them use it). Adding it to each file is a fairly time-consuming task.
- Before we started, we'd need to agree as to what they are for. Right now, I think they are mainly used when the name of a concept doesn't match the name of the function that implements it, e.g. "modulo", "remainder", "promise", "argmin", "assertion". The need for this usage is pretty rare. If they were used for everything, what would they contain?
- Keywording in a useful way is hard. There are spelling issues (e.g. optimise versus optimize); our fuzzy matching helps with those. But there are also multiple names for the same thing, and multiple meanings for the same name.
Duncan Murdoch
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