R help - Aug 2004 - suggestions motivated by quest for remainders

Some time ago I tried to find out how to compute remainders in R.
I now know that it is done with %%, which is documented in help('+'),
but before someone told me that I tried:
  help('remainder'), help.search('remainder'),
apropos('remainder')
  help('modulo'), help.search('modulo'), and
apropos('modulo')
all of which yielded nothing.
I then tried help.search('mod') which yielded many pages of output, none
of which seemed to be relevant to remainders.

1) Easy to implement small suggestion:
Add 'remainder' and 'modulus' as aliases to the help page for
'+'.

2) Hard to implement suggestion:
Add full-text search options to help.search(). If that were the case, 
help.search('mod') would have yielded '+' among its pages of
output.
I believe this would be very helpful in various situations (e.g., when
trying to find out how to set xlim).

-Ben

On Mon, 30 Aug 2004, Ben Wittner wrote:
> Some time ago I tried to find out how to compute remainders in R.
> I now know that it is done with %%, which is documented in
help('+'),
> but before someone told me that I tried:
>   help('remainder'), help.search('remainder'),
apropos('remainder')
>   help('modulo'), help.search('modulo'), and
apropos('modulo')
> all of which yielded nothing.
> I then tried help.search('mod') which yielded many pages of output,
none
> of which seemed to be relevant to remainders.
> 
> 1) Easy to implement small suggestion:
> Add 'remainder' and 'modulus' as aliases to the help page
for '+'.
We have \concept's for that, and I have added those.  But is hard to know 
what people are going to choose to search on.
> 2) Hard to implement suggestion:
> Add full-text search options to help.search(). If that were the case, 
> help.search('mod') would have yielded '+' among its pages
of output.
It's Arithmetic, not +, that comes up.
> I believe this would be very helpful in various situations (e.g., when
> trying to find out how to set xlim).
We do already have full-text-search on Windows CHM help, unfortunately
per-package.  If you try it you will find it does not work for your
suggested keywords, and you would be swamped by help.search('mod').

As ever, 

	R is a collaborative project with many contributors.

and it is open to you to contribute FTS extensions to help.search.
With 2.0.0 about to go into its final phases and needing all packages to 
be re-installed, now would be a very good time to do this.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at 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

Ben Wittner <bwittner <at> jimmy.harvard.edu> writes:

: Some time ago I tried to find out how to compute remainders in R.
: I now know that it is done with %%, which is documented in help('+'),
: but before someone told me that I tried:
:   help('remainder'), help.search('remainder'),
apropos('remainder')
:   help('modulo'), help.search('modulo'), and
apropos('modulo')
: all of which yielded nothing.
: I then tried help.search('mod') which yielded many pages of output,
none
: of which seemed to be relevant to remainders.

Any of these google searches will find it:

  R modulus
  site:r-project.org modulus
  r-project.org modulus

The first hit on the first two give a thread on r-help which, if followed,
gives the answer.  The first hit on the third points to Jonathan Baron's
reference card which has it.

Also if you go to the R web site, click on search in the left hand pane 
and try some of the R specific site searches -- these will also find it.

Finally, the R language manual, obtainable under windows by going into R
and clicking on Help and then Manual and then R Language Manual or in
doc/manual subdirectory in the R directory on your disk.

None of this is not to say that the help should not point to it, of course.