On Jan 3, 2007, at 11:02 AM, Hans-Joerg Bibiko wrote:
Hi Kevin,
On 24 Dec 2006, at 23:20, Kevin Ballard wrote:
What is texscan? I never knew that, so I always just ignored the command ;)
Actually, it was tex.scan, which is a simple ruby command scanning the string given by the variable tex. I think Kevin by accident mistyped it. (You can see the revision diff).
What a difference a dot makes, eh?
I'm not sure the command is necessary, though, as you can get help on each function really easily, and if you need a template for args, there's always Insert Command Template.
[...]
Arguably, this shows the default S3 method args when you give it the root, like it shows the args for mean.default when you give it mean, but Insert Command Template could always be tweaked to use foo.default if you just give it foo (and foo.default exists).
Yes of course. 'Insert Command Template' goes hand in hand with 'Command Usage'.
My point was that 'Command Usage' could be sometimes helpful, if I only want to know, what is the default of a variable, for instance. I don't know who wrote this command and why did he/she use 'texscan' to parse the R help files written in TeX. I also don't know this function 'texscan' but I suppose that this function gives you the text specified within the LaTeX tag \begin {Usage}.
I like the command too, though I don't really use it much at this point, (need to open the actual help file most of the times). I wrote the command originally, and looking at the revision history of the command would show that it was tex.scan. Does it work as expected if you make that change? If so, I don't really see the advantage of parsing the HTML file instead.
My other question was who is 'responsible' for the R bundle and can upload this changed version? I know the bundles are more or less a collaborative work but I believe that someone should organize these ;)
I think that's a bit unclear at the moment. Hadley Wickham, I think did the original import. Then Allan did some cleanup work on it. Then it stayed dormant for quite some time, until I started using R and started adding stuff to the bundle. Lately Kevin Ballard was using R and did some great work on the bundle. And now Hans has sent a lot of suggestions and improvements to the commands. So in some sense there is no official maintainer, though I would consider myself one of the maintainers, unfortunately overwhelmed at the moment with lots of other work, both textmate and real. If tex.scan instead of texscan works for you, then we can perhaps leave this command as is for now (well, with tex.scan instead of texscan).
Best,
Hans
Haris