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: > > >Why not, as previously has been proposed, replace the current static > >(and, in my view, not very useful) set of keywords in R > documentation > >with the requirement that package authors supply their own > keywords for > >each documented object? I believe that this is the intent of the > >concept entries in Rd files, but their use certainly is not > required or > >even 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 > > ______________________________________________ > [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 ______________________________________________ [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