On 11/01/2010 10:10 AM, henrik.p...@bio.ntnu.no wrote:
Dear R developers,
I find the format of descriptions of the arguments in the read.table
help text slightly inconsistent.
"Slightly inconsistent" is not a bug. Your bug report is quite likely
to be ignored because of that and because of the lack of an offer to
actually do the work it entails, regardless of the validity of your
observations.
A way to have attention paid to it is to choose a consistent style, then
edit every man page in one of the base packages to follow it, and submit
the patches to all those files, with an offer to do the rest once the
style is accepted. Expect that there will be one or more rounds of
discussion about whether your style really is usable. Writing a style
guide would really help.
Sound like too much work? I agree.
Duncan Murdoch
For example, the logical arguments comes in seven different formats,
more or less explicit about the consequences of a TRUE (or FALSE):
1. check.names logical. If TRUE then the names...
2. blank.lines.skip logical: if TRUE blank lines...
3. flush logical: if TRUE, scan...
4. header a logical value indicating whether...
5. allowEscapes logical. Should C-style [...] ?
6. stringsAsFactors logical: should character [...] ?
7. strip.white logical. Used only when...
First, I believe that a consistent style would make the help text easier
to follow. Second, I believe that an explicit style (sth like: "logical.
If TRUE/FALSE then...") is more intuitive and thus preferable over the
other styles. This might apply to other help pages as well.
I fully understand that the choice of style in help text is a matter of
taste and not of very high priority. Nevertheless, I just wish to
mention it as a potential for improvement.
Thank you for your great work with R!
Best regards,
Henrik
R version 2.10.1 (2009-12-14)
i386-pc-mingw32
locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United Kingdom.1252 LC_CTYPE=English_United
Kingdom.1252 LC_MONETARY=English_United Kingdom.1252 LC_NUMERIC=C
[5] LC_TIME=English_United Kingdom.1252
attached base packages:
[1] grDevices datasets splines graphics stats tcltk utils
methods base
other attached packages:
[1] svSocket_0.9-48 TinnR_1.0.3 R2HTML_1.59-1 Hmisc_3.7-0
survival_2.35-7
loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] cluster_1.12.1 grid_2.10.1 lattice_0.17-26 svMisc_0.9-56
tools_2.10.1
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