On 12/13/23 11:27, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
I doubt if anyone will take you up on this request. Only R Core
members can change those manuals, and it's hard work to write clear
and correct documentation. This probably won't make it high enough on
their lists of priorities to actually be addressed.
There is another aspect of this - portable R packages only use
documented behavior of R, relying on that such behavior will not change
unless absolutely necessary. A very hard part of writing/expanding the
official documentation is deciding on what should and what shouldn't be
the stable/documented behavior, and even more so when it is about
fundamental things. It is essential that some behavior stays
undocumented and is not relied on, otherwise it wouldn't be possible to
maintain and improve R.
So if you primarily wanted to get an answer to a specific technical
question about say formulas, it is best to just ask that question,
rather than asking for expanding the documentation.
Tomas
What you could do is try to write it yourself. Find some helpers who
really know the details (not necessarily R Core members) to review
your proposal. Once you have it written and everyone agrees it is
correct, either publish it as a blog entry somewhere, or submit it to
R Core for inclusion in the manual. I don't recommend posting early
drafts to this mailing list, though you could post near-final ones
here: you're only going to get a few comments before people lose
interest.
This would be a lot of work for you. Besides the work of writing
clearly and correctly, you need to learn the material. But that's a
big benefit for you if you are really interested in working with this
kind of thing.
Duncan Murdoch
On 13/12/2023 4:19 a.m., Iago Giné Vázquez wrote:
Dear all,
This is a request to get language objects more documented in the R
Language Definition document (CRAN
version<https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-lang.html>,
ETHZ R-devel
version<https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/doc/manual/R-lang.html>).
Section '2.1.3 Language objects' claims
There are three types of objects that constitute the R language. They
are calls, expressions, and names.
But then there is only a subsection '2.1.3.1 Symbol objects' which,
if I do not understand wrongly, correspond to names subtype of
language objects. It would be great if calls and expressions subtypes
were specified with more detail as well. And also calls subtype
'formula'.
I came to here since when looking help for formula, it documents the
stats function formula -Model Formula-, and it just says that it
produces an object of class '"formula"' [...] and that a formula
object has an associated environment [...]. Maybe this, and saying
that the mode of a formula is a call it is enough to describe a formula?
Same section 2.1.3 also claims
They can be [...] converted to and from lists by the as.list and
as.call functions
It could be added also a description of how these lists should be
(structured, their components, names, etc.) for the different
language objects, that is, for names, expressions, calls, formulas
and so on.
Thank you.
Best wishes,
Iago
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