It would help if you were to tell up which package you are talking about.  I 
take it this is the survival package and this is the proportioanl hazards 
fitting function for case-cohort data.  

You would have seen earlier in the code that

    method <- match.arg(method)

so at that stage 'method' is a character string.  The default is "Prentice".

so

    fitter <- get(method)

will search for an object whose name matches that character string and return 
it.  Presumably this is a fitting function requested on the call to fit the 
model.

So the answer to your question is "The fitter here is whatever method the user 
specified on the call.  If none were specified it defaults to Prentice()."

Next you will probably want to know where Prentice() can be found.  The answer 
is "inside the survival NAMESPACE", and it is not exported.  So to see that 
function you will need to use

    survival:::Prentice

This will most likely become very tedious and ultimately frustrating.  You can 
always look at code - that's the facility that open source software is famous 
for providing - but it really is a last resort.  You are much better reading 
the documentation very carefully and checking the examples provided.  Trust me, 
I'm a statistician.

Bill Venables.

-----Original Message-----
From: r-help-boun...@r-project.org [mailto:r-help-boun...@r-project.org] On 
Behalf Of Qian Xiyuan
Sent: Wednesday, 29 September 2010 6:00 AM
To: r-help@r-project.org
Subject: [R] ask for a question with cch function

Dear all,
I am reading the cch function source code. But I can not understand the
following codes. Please help me.
What's the fitter here?

 fitter <- get(method)
 out <- fitter(tenter = tenter, texit = texit, cc = cc, id = id, X = X, ntot
= nn, robust = robust)

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