R help - Apr 2006 - Command line support tools - suggestions?

Dear Community,

I'm interested in developing a package that could ease the
command-line learning curve for new users.  It would provide more
detailed syntax checking and commentary as feedback.  It would try to
anticipate common new-user errors, and provide feedback to help
correct them. 

As a trivial example, instead of
> mean(c(1,2,NA))
[1] NA

we might have
> mean(c(1,2,NA))
[1] NA
Warning: your data contain missing values.  If you wish to ignore
these to compute a mean, use "na.rm=TRUE".




I'm interested in any thoughts that people have about this idea -
what errors do you commonly see, and how can they be dealt with?

I have applied for funding for a couple of months of programming
support for this idea, and will find out whether or not I get it
later this month.  Until then, I thought that it would be interesting
to kick around some ideas for the sorts of changes that we could try.

Cheers,

Andrew
-- 
Andrew Robinson  
Department of Mathematics and Statistics            Tel: +61-3-8344-9763
University of Melbourne, VIC 3010 Australia         Fax: +61-3-8344-4599
Email: a.robinson at ms.unimelb.edu.au         http://www.ms.unimelb.edu.au

> I'm interested in any thoughts that people have about this idea -
> what errors do you commonly see, and how can they be dealt with?
NAs introduced by coercion

> I'm interested in any thoughts that people have about this idea -
> what errors do you commonly see, and how can they be dealt with?
Another (selfish) idea: a guide for programmers coming from other languages 
that highlights the differences between languages. For example, a perl to R 
guide or C to R.

This is a slightly different concept, but might be a little easier to pin 
down.

Larry Howe