Berton Gunter has written in part: > A few comments:
> First, your remarks are interesting and, I would say, mainly well founded. However, I think they > are in many respects irrelevant, although they do point to the much bigger underlying issue, > which Roger Peng also hinted at in his reply. > I think they are sensible because R IS difficult; the documentation is often challenging, which is > not surprising given (a) the inherent complexity of R; (b) the difficulty in writing good > documentation, especially when many of the functions being documented are inherently > technical, so subject matter knowledge (CS, statistics, numerical analysis ,...) must be > assumed; My experience has been that the real challenge is not understanding the documentation, but finding it. Once I know the names of one or more candidate functions I am happily on my way. One of the delights of reading r-help is that one keeps discovering useful functions. In the best of all possible worlds I could ask an intelligent agent to summon up the k-nearest neighbor functions that would "do X." Not likely. Years ago StatSci Europe published a handy little "Complete Listing of S-PLUS Functions", categorized in some way. I found it useful. Something similar for R would not go amiss. I know, it would want to be 420 pages rather than 42. ********************************************************** Cliff Lunneborg, Professor Emeritus, Statistics & Psychology, University of Washington, Seattle [EMAIL PROTECTED] ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html