R devel - Sep 2003 - glitch in terms documentation (PR#4146)

These are two small items that caught my eye.

I'm looking at the R 1.7.1 2003-06-16 pdf reference manual.  There are
several refences to terms.default (e.g., p. 711, 712) but no definitions
of it.  I'm guessing this means terms, but it's a little puzzling.

Also, the desription of terms.object  does not mention that the
"variables" attribute is actually a list of calls--surprising to me,
since I was expecting text like all.vars.  It would be useful to
indicate if all.vars returns the same ordering as the variables
attribute (at least, I'm wondering it now, though this might be a sign
I've gone astray).

Thanks.
-- 
Ross Boylan                                      wk:  (415) 502-4031
530 Parnassus Avenue (Library) rm 115-4          ross@biostat.ucsf.edu
Dept of Epidemiology and Biostatistics           fax: (415) 476-9856
University of California, San Francisco
San Francisco, CA 94143-0840                     hm:  (415) 550-1062

On Fri, 12 Sep 2003 ross@biostat.ucsf.edu wrote:
> These are two small items that caught my eye.
> 
> I'm looking at the R 1.7.1 2003-06-16 pdf reference manual.  There are
> several refences to terms.default (e.g., p. 711, 712) but no definitions
> of it.  I'm guessing this means terms, but it's a little puzzling.
No, it means the default method of the terms generic. Try ?terms.default, 
which gives you a complete explanation.

Page numbers are useless to us, BTW, as they depend on the papersize and
I suspect you are not using ISO sizes.
> Also, the desription of terms.object  does not mention that the
> "variables" attribute is actually a list of calls--surprising to
me,
It isn't.  It is a single call to list.
> since I was expecting text like all.vars.
But, it says it is a `list'.  Wrong, but not character (if that is what 
you meant by `text').
>   It would be useful to
> indicate if all.vars returns the same ordering as the variables
> attribute (at least, I'm wondering it now, though this might be a sign
> I've gone astray).
What has all.vars to do with terms?  All.vars applies to an expression or 
call, and terms() applies to a formula or a model object.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595