[R] Code completion

[A.J. Rossini]

>>>>> "PD" == Peter Dalgaard <BSA <p.dalgaard at pubhealth.ku.dk>> writes:


    PD> rossini at blindglobe.net (A.J. Rossini) writes:
    >> >>>>> "JT" == Jason Turner <jasont at indigoindustrial.co.nz>
    >> writes:
    >> 
    JT> ESS does provide command completion.  It's not sophisticated
    JT> enough (as far as I can tell) to provide context-specific
    JT> completion.
    >> One issue here is (for ESS) is the mechanism for discovery.
    >> Duncan, Brian, et al, is there anyway to "discover" arguments
    >> in R, like you can do for methods in Java/Python, etc?  (I'm
    >> thinking there was, but can't seem to recall the exact function
    >> name, args()?)

    PD> One thing I remember from the Borland products was the very
    PD> simple mechanism of pressing a hotkey to get help on the
    PD> function call you were in the process of writing.

    PD> That kind of thing would seem to be fairly easy to implement
    PD> in ESS, (now don't tell me it does so already...) e.g. user
    PD> types

    PD> hist(x,

    PD> then realizes that he forgot how to set break values, hits
    PD> C-F1 (say), and the minibuffer says

    PD> help on [hist]:

    PD> press return and get the synopsis of hist in other-window,
    PD> with a "more..." entry to get you the rest of the help page
    PD> (or maybe just give the whole help page right away).

Emacs does this for emacs-lisp, so....

(anyway, I've got a preliminary version of what John A. suggested --
it brings up the results of "args" in a separate buffer.  Just need to
format, etc, so that it'll be a "fill in the blanks".  
        M-x ess-dump-args-and-go  
in the next version of ESS).

The other paradigm that would be nice would be like what PSGML mode
does for XML/SGML/HTML -- C-c C-a brings up a window for the tag
attributes.   This might be more like what John wants, where you can
use [tab] to move between fields, and defaults are specified.    For
this, I'd need a much better discovery mechanism than args().

best,
-tony

-- 
A.J. Rossini				Rsrch. Asst. Prof. of Biostatistics
UW Biostat/Center for AIDS Research	rossini at u.washington.edu	
FHCRC/SCHARP/HIV Vaccine Trials Net	rossini at scharp.org
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