[ESS] R help for S4 not opening in help buffer
Martin Maechler
maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch
Thu Oct 7 09:47:52 CEST 2010
>>>>> "VN" == Vinh Nguyen <vqnguyen at uci.edu>
>>>>> on Tue, 5 Oct 2010 08:19:05 -0700 writes:
VN> On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 7:24 AM, James W. MacDonald
VN> <jmacdon at med.umich.edu> wrote:
>> Try
>>
>> ?matrix-class ?show-methods
VN> Thanks James. This works for the matrix class.
VN> However, suppose I load the lme4 package. Then
VN> "?show-methods" does not show me documentation about the
VN> "mer" class show method. I would have to use
VN> method?show("mer") to get the right documentation
VN> (although this also brings me to mer-class since it is
VN> aliased in the documentation).
yes.
VN> I guess this way of getting documentation for S4 classes
VN> and methods are not yet implemented in ESS.
That is correct. ESS does not yet deal nicely with the two argument
versions of '?'.
But -- as James MacDonald hinted -- if you know a bit how S4
classes and methods are documented,
you get to the correct help page quickly by trying
?mer-class
and find those show(<mer>) methods that are documented with
the class,
or if necessary (not in these cases, and more rarely typically),
?show-methods
--
Yes, smart dealing with two-argument version of "?" in ESS is something we
(ESS core) know has been on the wish list for a very long time,
..
and IIRC one reason why we hadn't worked much on solving it,
was that the proposal was that 'R' or the ESS-R interface should
be made more flexible...
One underlying problem is that "?" in R has becomde now
different from help(.),
and the ESS interface was designed assuming these two were the
same, or rather "?" was a special version of help(), where as
now, these are two different functions, both relying on the same
basic "infrastructure" (lower-level "helper functions", ...).
Patches / Volunteers (both good in R and emacs lisp)
are very welcome ...
Martin
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