[R] R's documentation

[Zheng, Xin (NIH) [C]]

Thanks for your information. I am curious why in 2.8.1 the document was not changed. That's easier than writing something in NEWS. 

But I DO see 'sum' rather than 'mean' in 2.9.0 now. It's not reverted yet as the NEWS saying. And it's still documented to use 'mean'. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Prof Brian Ripley [mailto:ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk] 
Sent: Friday, May 29, 2009 12:28 PM
To: Zheng, Xin (NIH) [C]
Cc: r-help at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [R] R's documentation

Which version of R is this?  From the BUGS section in NEWS for R 2.9.0 
patched:

     o	median.default() was altered in 2.8.1 to use sum() rather
 	than mean(), although it was still documented to use mean().
 	This caused problems for POSIXt objects, for which mean() but
 	not sum() makes sense, so the change has been reverted.

So this was a bug, but it has already been fixed (see the comments in 
the posting guide and especially the FAQ about checking if things have 
already been changed).

On Fri, 29 May 2009, Zheng, Xin (NIH) [C] wrote:

> Ok, pls take a look at '?median'. Can you see "However, the default 
> method makes use of 'sort' and 'mean'"? Then let's look at 
> 'median.default'. I do see 'sort'. But where is 'mean'? At first 
> glance I didn't catch the exact point of its algorithm. Why not say 
> more clearly that "make use of partial sorting and calculating mean 
> of middle values".
>
> Maybe I'm too strict. It's not a really bug. Let's stop this thread.
>
> From: Kjetil Halvorsen [mailto:kjetilbrinchmannhalvorsen at gmail.com]
> Sent: Friday, May 29, 2009 11:16 AM
> To: Zheng, Xin (NIH) [C]
> Cc: r-help at r-project.org
> Subject: Re: [R] R's documentation
>
> On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 11:01 AM, Zheng, Xin (NIH) [C] <zhengxin at mail.nih.gov<mailto:zhengxin at mail.nih.gov>> wrote:
> Sometimes I get confused with R's documentation. It seems the documents is not maintained and updated well. Anyone has similar feeling? I don't mean to offend anyone. I hope R would get better and better. But documentation is really one very important factor which could attract people coming or drive people away.
>
> ??Do you have any specific example? Without examples it is difficult to say much.
> ??Do you refer to the core part of R, or to contributed packages?
>
> My impression is that when some functions are changed, the documentation is generally
> changed at the same time. And I am sure that is the goal, so if you know a case where it did not happen you should
> file a bug report.
>
> kjetil
>
>
>
> Xin Zheng
>
>
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>
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-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
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