R-alpha: A Couple of Queries

[Thomas Lumley]

On Thu, 15 May 1997, Ross Ihaka wrote:


> I have not done anything about name-space clutter, but I have a couple
> of ideas on name hiding which might be possible ( basically, every
> library would have to "export" the names it wanted to be visible to
> users).

This is certainly nice in principle, though not tremendously important at
the moment. It would be convenient to be able to declare functions in a
library that are global to the library but not accessible to the outside
world. 

> 2) I am going ahead with implementing saving and restoring of data in
> XDR format, so that there will be less trouble with heterogeneous Unix
> networks.  Because the format of saved files will change, we must
> either be incompatible or have some mechanism for restoring old save
> files.  I would rather avoid the compatibility route if possible.
> Would anyone be seriously inconvenienced if old data files could not
> be restored?  (Its not hard to build in compatibility, it would just
> take time which could be spend elsewhere).

For my purposes dump() will work fine for transferring old data files.

Will the changes give cross-platform (Mac/Win) portability too?

Thomas Lumley
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