R-alpha: options [--no-*-file] AND --dont-stop-on-error-if-batch
Kurt Hornik
Kurt.Hornik@ci.tuwien.ac.at
Thu, 21 Aug 1997 23:02:06 +0200
>>>>> Thomas Lumley writes:
> On Tue, 12 Aug 1997, Martin Maechler wrote:
>>
>> As Thomas Lumley has noted before, the behavior in 'batch mode' has changed;
>> namely "Termination upon 'error'".
>>
>> I think this is THE good default behavior for "batch mode".
>> However
>> 1) for several purposes I'd very much want an option to change this
>> default behavior.
> Hear, hear!
>>
>> I think it'd be very neat then if
>> options(error.stop = FALSE)
>> actually translated all errors [stop(.)] to warnings [warning()].
>>
> I'm not convinced. Being able to make warnings fatal is a good option,
> but being able to continue after errors may make no sense. How do you
> continue after subscript out of bounds, or argument missing with no
> default, or memory exhausted or ...
> You may well need to jump back to the top level before it makes sense to
> continue. On the other hand, once at the top level it is certainly
> possible to proceed, and so there should be an option to do it.
There is an obvious trade-off between having a lot of flexibility and
simple too many options :-)
I am not sure about making warnings fatal. E.g., code for chisquare
tests usually displays a warning if the approximation may be bad. That
should never be fatal, though ...
Re termination upon error, couldn't there be situations with a huge
simulation loop where one could still do something useful after
e.g. running out of memory?
If I unterstand Martin correctly, the extra options() come into being
only because command-line options are hard to port to point-and-click
interfaces ...
-k
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