Hi Achim: Your reply is tremendously helpful in addressing some of the outstanding questions I had about R. The 'econometrics view' materials look exactly like what I needed. Many thanks!
But, there is a second point here, which is how difficult it was for me, as someone just becoming more familiar w/ R's more basic capabilities (in the past I've focused on features like optim, sem), to find what seem to me like standard & key features I've taken for granted in other packages. I looked high & low in my existing installed packages for the standard version of R, I googled, I looked in the r-help archives, I looked through several manuals / introductions to R I had downloaded. I've asked questions about all of the points I raised in my email on this email list before. I believe I passed through the parent directory for the econometric view material at the website w/o realizing what it contained because I thought of "computational econometrics" as having to do w/ running Monte Carlo models of economic processes. If R wants to bring in a wider audience, one thing that might help is a denser set of cross-references. For example, perhaps lm's help should mention the econometrics view materials as well as other places to look for tests and procedures people may want to do w/ lm. Another thought is that perhaps the standard R package help should allow people to find non-installed but commonly used contributed packages and perhaps their help page contents. A feature that would be very helpful for me is the capacity to search all the contents of help files, not just keywords that at times seem to miss what I'm trying to find. Cheers, Peter ______________________________________________ [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
