Finding What You Need in R: function arguments/parameters from outside the function's package
- by doug
Often in R, there are a dozen functions scattered across as many packages--all of which have the same purpose but of course differ in accuracy, performance, theoretical rigor, and so on.
How do you gather all of these in one place before you start your task?
So for instance: the generic plot function. Setting secondary ticks is much easier (IMHO) using a function outside of the base package, minor.tick(nx=n, ny=n, tick.ratio=n), found in Hmisc. Of course, that doesn't show up in plot's docstring. Likewise, the data-input arguments to 'plot' can be supplied by an object returned from the function 'hexbin', again, from a library outside of the base installation (where 'plot' resides). What would be great obviously is a programmatic way to gather these function arguments from the various libraries and put them in a single namespace.
edit: (trying to re-state my example just above more clearly:) the arguments to plot supplied in the base package for, e.g., setting the axis tick frequency are xaxp/yaxp; however, one can also set a/t/f via a function outside of the base package, again, as in the minor.tick function from the Hmisc package--but you wouldn't know that just from looking at the plot method signature. Is there a meta function in R for this?
So far, as i come across them, i've been manually gathering them in a TextMate 'snippet' (along with the attendant library imports). This isn't that difficult or time consuming, but i can only update my snippet as i find out about these additional arguments/parameters. Is there a canonical R way to do this, or at least an easier way?
Just in case that wasn't clear, i am not talking about the case where multiple packages provide functions directed to the same statistic or view (e.g., 'boxplot' in the base package; 'boxplot.matrix' in gplots; and 'bplots' in Rlab). What i am talking is the case in which the function name is the same across two or more packages.
