[R] Suggestion for posting guide

[Gabor Grothendieck]

Martin Maechler <maechler <at> stat.math.ethz.ch> writes:

>     >> dput(x)
> 
> Rereading the posting guide (which *really* is rather too long
> already for beginners), I see that we already have an 'Examples:' section.
> [Have you seen that, Gabor, and not found useful enough?]
> 
> And just below that, we say
> 
>   PGuide> When providing examples, it is best to give an R command that
>   PGuide> constructs the data, as in the matrix() expression above. For
>   PGuide> more complicated data structures, dump("x", file=stdout())
>   PGuide> will print an expression that will recreate the object x.
> 
> I tend to think that
> 	dump("x", file=stdout())
> should probably be replaced with 
>         dput(x)
> 

I plead guilty to missing this but in my defense I think everyone else 
missed it too since I can't ever remember anyone using dump or dput in a 
post.

Also I don't see too many people using the built in data sets for their
data either although perhaps that's changing since I noticed a post with
the iris data set just today or yesterday.  The nice thing about using the
built in data sets for examples is that it makes it easy for the person
asking the question to include data and it makes the post easy to
understand since it replaces a potentially complex expression to generate 
data with something as simple as:

   data(iris)

reducing the mental load of the post.

At any rate, I will think about this some more and I agree with you and
Tony that its important to keep the guide short and its nice that we have
a posting guide so can have discussions like this.