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List:       ess-help
Subject:    Re: [ESS] R help for S4 not opening in help buffer
From:       Martin Maechler <maechler () stat ! math ! ethz ! ch>
Date:       2010-10-07 7:47:52
Message-ID: 19629.31528.147863.271106 () lynne ! math ! ethz ! ch
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>>>>> "VN" == Vinh Nguyen <vqnguyen@uci.edu>
>>>>>     on Tue, 5 Oct 2010 08:19:05 -0700 writes:

    VN> On Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 7:24 AM, James W. MacDonald
    VN> <jmacdon@med.umich.edu> wrote:
    >> Try
    >> 
    >> ?matrix-class ?show-methods

    VN> Thanks James.  This works for the matrix class.
    VN> However, suppose I load the lme4 package.  Then
    VN> "?show-methods" does not show me documentation about the
    VN> "mer" class show method.  I would have to use
    VN> method?show("mer") to get the right documentation
    VN> (although this also brings me to mer-class since it is
    VN> aliased in the documentation).

yes.

    VN> I guess this way of getting documentation for S4 classes
    VN> and methods are not yet implemented in ESS.

That is correct. ESS does not yet deal nicely with the two argument
versions of '?'.
But -- as James MacDonald hinted -- if you know a bit how S4
classes and methods are documented,
you get to the correct help page quickly by trying

    ?mer-class

and find those  show(<mer>)  methods that are documented with
the class,
or if necessary (not in these cases, and more rarely typically),

   ?show-methods

--

Yes, smart dealing with two-argument version of "?" in ESS is something we
(ESS core) know has been on the wish list for a very long time,
..
and IIRC one reason why we hadn't worked much on solving it,
was that the proposal was that 'R' or the ESS-R interface should
be made more flexible...
One underlying problem is that  "?"  in R  has becomde now
different from  help(.),
and the ESS interface was designed assuming these two were the
same, or rather "?" was a special version of help(), where as
now, these are two different functions, both relying on the same
basic "infrastructure" (lower-level "helper functions", ...).

Patches / Volunteers (both good in R and emacs lisp) 
are very welcome ...

Martin

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