[R] Rd Files?

Wolski wolski at molgen.mpg.de
Tue Dec 2 17:45:46 CET 2003


Hi!

It would be great If the problem with prompt or package.skeleton would be only the file naming conventions on different platforms. For me the hack with gsub(“<-”,”=”,functionname) and sys.info()[“sysname”] worked and I generated Rd files for all my functions. 

I have seen the output and it does not matter to me anymore if prompt or package.skeleton works on any platform. I hope it wasn't a too big heresy.
If someone would ask me what are the week point of R, then the only one that pops up immediately, is that the documentation to functions have to be stored in a separate file than the code.  I am a big R/S fan. 
But its a pity that comments above or below the function declaration are not recognized by the help system. Therefore "prompt" or "package.skeleton" how they are implemented now are not of big use to me. 
They do not cope with comments in the source. And its good to comment the code anyway. So prompt and package.skeleton are not the functionality for which I am looking. 
I am looking for functions that enable me a documentation concept how it was introduced, or I encountered first, by javadoc. I also know that it is now implemented for many other languages by  such tools like doxygen which run on any platform. I  heard that they can be adapted to other languages too and to generate specific output probably also Rd files.
 
For now, to get started with any documentation, I decided to use a perl hack that parses the code and generates Rd files. And this was for what i was looking for.

Eryk


*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 12/2/2003 at 11:09 AM Duncan Murdoch wrote:

>On 01 Dec 2003 22:15:57 +0100, Peter Dalgaard
><p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk> wrote :
>
>>Just one thing to add: If Wolski gets sufficiently annoyed to actually
>>try and do this right, he'll want a naming scheme that works on *all*
>>platforms, so branching on sys.info()["sysname"]=="Windows" is surely
>>wrong. 
>
>Probably the right way to do it is to write a Sys.legal.filenames()
>function that takes a vector of strings and creates legal filenames
>out of them.  I'm not sure what optional args it would want, but
>possibilities are
>
>  - Avoid existing filenames.
>  - Do it in a certain path.
>  - Do it in a way that's likely to be portable to other systems.
>  - Create filenames that are convenient, not just legal (e.g. even on
>Unix, don't allow asterisks or other characters that shells pay
>attention to; on Windows, avoid embedded spaces, etc.).
>
>Duncan Murdoch



Dipl. bio-chem. Eryk Witold Wolski    @    MPI-MG Dep. Vertebrate Genomics   
Ihnestrasse 73 14195 Berlin          'v'    
tel: 0049-30-84131285               /   \    
mail: wolski at molgen.mpg.de        ---W-W----    http://www.molgen.mpg.de/~wolski




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