[Rd] Functions with the same name: best practices

[hadley wickham]

Ok, here's another best practices question - let's say I'm writing a
package and I want to use a function name that is already claimed by a
function in the base R packages.  For the sake of argument, let's
pretend this function is for profiling the performance of a function
(like Rprof for example), and so an obvious name that comes to mind is
profile.  This, of course, clashes with the built in profile for
"investigating behavior of objective function near the solution
represented by fitted."

A little thinking and a quick survey of other packages reveal some
possible solutions:

 * capitalise the function differently (eg. Profile)
 * use a prefix/suffic (eg. Rprof)
 * use a thesaurus
 * use namespaces (and rely on others to use namespaces correctly in
their code/packages)

What would you suggest?

Thanks again,

Hadley