Open MichaelChirico opened 4 years ago
MichaelChirico
commented
4 years ago Created attachment 947 [details]
MichaelChirico
commented
4 years ago Audit (from Jitterbug): Tue Jun 19 09:07:09 2001 ripley moved from incoming to Documentation
MichaelChirico
commented
4 years ago To be honest, I only learned R-intro exists today, having used R for 6+ years already. I have read only the sections called out specifically in the attachment here.
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Although I agree the section Ordered and Unordered Factors in R-intro is a bit sparse, I'm not sure the proposed patch fits. Perhaps the patch was designed for an older version of the manual (this was proposed >18 years ago, after all), but the text provided doesn't seem to fit too well.
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The discussion of Named Arguments and Defaults is also a bit amiss. The author wants to know a general answer to "How can I tell which arguments are required for a function?" where the only general answer is "That function's help page is responsible to tell you" due to lazy evaluation. Perhaps this observation could be noted. I would also say that it should be helpful to include an example in this section of using positional arguments out of order, like:
ans <- fun1(d, graph=TRUE, df, limit=20)--
The next suggestion is some additional exposition for the Getting Help with Functions and Features section, about "how to read a help page". I think a reference to ?help would suffice; there's already such a reference, but it's referred to for Windows users.
MichaelChirico
commented
4 years ago There are five issue reports about improvements to r-intro all from 2001 through 2008. None of them are huge and they seem reasonable. Does it make sense to do them? Or should r-intro be a kind of historic document that was produced at a certain time and frozen, especially given that there are so many resources at this point https://www.r-project.org/doc/bib/R-jabref.html.
https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=1011 https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=7195 https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=7208 https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=10701
From: "Paul E. Johnson" <pauljohn@<::CENSORED -- SEE ORIGINAL ON BUGZILLA::>> PARTS: 2 I asked Prof. Brian Ripley if I might submit some text/input for the R-intro writers, he said this is the place to do it.
I was on a plane a couple of weeks ago reading R-intro as I plan for a course and made these notes, some of which I think will help my students if you incorporate them. I've attached a raw text file I wrote in Emacs to this message "Rintrochanges.txt".
I have written documents like R-intro before and understand it is difficult to please everybody, and I thank you for your effort on the project.
Paul Johnson Assoc. Professor Dept. of Political Science University of Kansas
(Attached 'Rintrochanges.txt' of type 'text/plain')
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