On Tue, 19 Sep 2006, hadley wickham wrote: >> > Well, I know that, and you know that, but how is anyone supposed to >> > figure it out? It means that you need to have a working knowledge of >> > the S3 and S4 class systems before you can use the help to reliably >> > get the documentation you need. >> >> For S3 you do to understand that there are different methods, and it >> is in `An Introduction to R'. And ?summary reminds you. > > But you also have to be able to identify if it is a S3 function or an > S4 method (or an ordinary function).
Why not just type ?summary, which as I said, does tell you up front? > The reason I find this so much of a problem is that when you are > teaching R, one of the first things you want to do is teach your > students how to use help. However, you can't teach them to use it > effectively until they know an awful lot about how the call semantics > of R. In many years of teaching S/R I have not found that to be a problem. -- Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595 ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
