On Fri, 17 Oct 2003, Thomas Lumley wrote: > On Fri, 17 Oct 2003, Kurt Hornik wrote: > > > >>>>> Peter Dalgaard writes: > > > > > Kurt Hornik <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > KH> Or get rid of non-standard evaluation and educate users to use quoted > > KH> strings where strings should be used. > > >> > > >> > and infuriate those who know and used the S language for more than 15 > > >> > years, where help(help) has always worked? > > >> > > help(help) might be unavoidable, but there is nothing incompatible with S > about requiring the argument to data() to be quoted, and that was what the > original question was about.
It was about the *package* argument to data, and I see no reason at all why that should be accepted as a name. We don't allow lib.loc in library() to be a name, and that seems the closest equivalent. I think that for back-conmpatibility we do need to allow ?topic help(topic) data(dataset) but could require the package argument to be quoted (note that data has a list= argument, and help could be given a character.only one). -- 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 ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
