[R] [FORGED] sd in aggregate and help.search/?? seem not to work as usual in latest version

[Rolf Turner]

On 1/07/19 9:41 PM, Marvin Kiene wrote:
> Hello dear helpers,
> 
> I am currently running a small R-crash course for beginners at my
> university, since I believe that there a far too few lectures about how to
> use R.
> 
> Thereby, I showed the '??' or 'help.search()' function to the students as
> well as the 'aggregate()' function with 'FUN=sd'.
> 
>   
> 
> The code worked fine for me - as usual (in version 3.5.1) - but not for the
> students. Doing some research got me to the point, that in the current
> version (3.6.0),
> 
> 'aggregate' cannot use 'sd' for data.frames with mixed columns of factors
> and numeric columns and throws an error (which is somewhat ok, since 'var()'
> is not applicable for factors, of course)  instead of putting 'NA's into the
> respective columns like it does with 'FUN=mean' and like it does in the
> former version(s).
> 
> Is this a bug or a feature? It would be nice to work with it, the way I am
> used to. Of course it is not difficult to work around this problem, but it
> is somewhat strange, why it was changed that way (if this was intended).
> 
>   
> 
> Additionally, the 'help.search()' always just gives the result: "No results
> found", for all of my students.
> 
>   
> 
> I didn't find any post about that issues so far, so I am not sure whether
> this are known issues (but all of my 10 students had this problem).
> 
>   
> 
> If this were intended changes, I would be interested, what the reason is and
> whether there are direct workarounds (e.g. instead of using only numeric
> columns), for those issues.
> 
> Otherwise I am looking forward to a fixed version.
> 
>   
> 
> Thanks in advance for your help!

Can't offer much help, especially in respect of the first issue 
involving aggregate(). (But it sounds to me more like a bug than a feature.)

I would just like to point out that when I do

     help.search()

(with no argument) I get:

> Error in help.search() : do not know what to search

This seems reasonable, apart from being ungrammatical.

If I do, e.g.,

    help.search("ellipse")

I get a brazillion results.

This is with version 3.6.0.

cheers,

Rolf Turner

-- 
Honorary Research Fellow
Department of Statistics
University of Auckland
Phone: +64-9-373-7599 ext. 88276