[6272] in s-news-athena
Use the electronic help facility. [Was Summary: counting reps of x]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Venables)
Fri Jan 27 02:07:49 1995
To: s-news@utstat.toronto.edu
From: wvenable@attunga.stats.adelaide.edu.au (Bill Venables)
Date: 27 Jan 1995 01:29:15 GMT
>>>>> "Bill" == Bill Shipley <bshipley@courrier.usherb.ca> writes:
Bill> Yesterday I asked for ideas on how to count the number of
Bill> replicate values in a vector. [snip]
Bill> I'm sorry to have posted such a simple problem. I assure
Bill> you that I spent over an hour searching through the
Bill> documentation for such a function, but it never occured to
Bill> me that functions with names like "table" or "rle" would do
Bill> what I wanted. Is this problem with documentation of
Bill> functions in S-PLUS simply due to my lack of experience
Bill> ... or is this a general problem.
It is a general problem and the reason seems to be that no-one
seems to be willing or able to use the online help facility.
This is a big mystery to me, because it's a very useful gadget.
It's hard when you know the answer to retrace the steps you might
have adopted to find it, but if you go to the online help
facility, the first general heading you would probably look at is
"Categorical data". Under this listing you find, among not too
many other things:
table Create contingency table from categorical data.
That's pretty explicit and it took about ten seconds.
You may take longer to find it, of course, but I am sure if it is
used effectively the help facility will get you there much faster
than any hardcopy documentation (yes, *any* :-). In every course
I teach no matter how much I stress to my students how valuable
it is, they still seem to head for the books first. I simply
cannot understand people's reluctance to use the electronic help.
Bill> Perhaps some sort of standardization of function names is
Bill> needed?
That's a bit drastic and right wing... One reform I would like
to see in this area, though, is to move away from abbreviated
names and always use full names. This could be done
progressively using aliases, just as now "resid" and "residuals"
are aliases for each other. With S-mode in emacs you have name
completion, so typing the whole thing is not even a problem.
Bill
--
_________________________________________________________________
Bill Venables, Department of Statistics, Tel.: +61 8 303 3026
The University of Adelaide, Fax.: +61 8 232 5670
South AUSTRALIA. 5005. Email: venables@stats.adelaide.edu.au
