Which version of R is this? From the BUGS section in NEWS for R 2.9.0 patched:

    o   median.default() was altered in 2.8.1 to use sum() rather
        than mean(), although it was still documented to use mean().
        This caused problems for POSIXt objects, for which mean() but
        not sum() makes sense, so the change has been reverted.

So this was a bug, but it has already been fixed (see the comments in the posting guide and especially the FAQ about checking if things have already been changed).

On Fri, 29 May 2009, Zheng, Xin (NIH) [C] wrote:

Ok, pls take a look at '?median'. Can you see "However, the default method makes use of 'sort' and 'mean'"? Then let's look at 'median.default'. I do see 'sort'. But where is 'mean'? At first glance I didn't catch the exact point of its algorithm. Why not say more clearly that "make use of partial sorting and calculating mean of middle values".

Maybe I'm too strict. It's not a really bug. Let's stop this thread.

From: Kjetil Halvorsen [mailto:kjetilbrinchmannhalvor...@gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, May 29, 2009 11:16 AM
To: Zheng, Xin (NIH) [C]
Cc: r-help@r-project.org
Subject: Re: [R] R's documentation

On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 11:01 AM, Zheng, Xin (NIH) [C] 
<zheng...@mail.nih.gov<mailto:zheng...@mail.nih.gov>> wrote:
Sometimes I get confused with R's documentation. It seems the documents is not 
maintained and updated well. Anyone has similar feeling? I don't mean to offend 
anyone. I hope R would get better and better. But documentation is really one 
very important factor which could attract people coming or drive people away.

??Do you have any specific example? Without examples it is difficult to say 
much.
??Do you refer to the core part of R, or to contributed packages?

My impression is that when some functions are changed, the documentation is 
generally
changed at the same time. And I am sure that is the goal, so if you know a case 
where it did not happen you should
file a bug report.

kjetil



Xin Zheng


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