[6298] in s-news-athena
Re: documentation of S functions
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Albyn Jones)
Sat Jan 28 13:36:03 1995
Date: Sat, 28 Jan 95 10:23 PST
From: jones@reed.edu (Albyn Jones)
To: dhk@psych.columbia.edu
Cc: s-news@utstat.toronto.edu
In-Reply-To: <199501271304.IAA02366@paradox.psych.columbia.edu> (dhk@psych.columbia.edu)
Dave Krantz (dhk@columbia.edu):
> 5. Most of the materials I have seen relating to S have too
>few examples. People learn most easily from seeing a variety of
>examples, rather than by assimilating abstract statements. Examples
>should be interspersed in text, even in .Help files, and the examples
>at the end of documentation sections or chapters should be deliberately
>varied to illustrate some of the scope of the syntactic devices and
>some of the range of possible applications. It is true that longer
>documentation, resulting from many more examples, can be a bit
>unwieldy, but skipping examples is much easier than generating them.
>
i think this comment is absolutely right on. for S functions that i don't
use often, it is often extremely helpful to find an analog of an
intended use as an example in the help docs.
albyn jones
jones@reed.edu
