R-alpha: A Couple of Queries

[Paul Gilbert]

>1) I have been working on making R libraries more like those in S.
...
>	> library("eda")
>	> search()
>	[1] ".GlobalEnv"   "library:eda"  "library:base"

As I recall in S, library() adds to the end of the search list unless
First=T is specified. The function attach() works by putting things in
position 2.

>Libraries will have a .First and .Last functions.
As I recall these are called .First.lib and .Last.lib in S.

>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).

In theory this is probably the preferred way to do this, but I think
compatability with S may be more easily maintained if you explicitly hide
names which can be hidden.

...
>Would anyone be seriously inconvenienced if old data files could not
>be restored? 

This is not a problem for me. However, if you do it, a separate conversion
utility might be better as it is something for which there will eventually
be no need.

Also, on XDR, I  took a quick scan through the Bank  of Canada PADI code
which uses XDR, just to see if there might be any helpful hints.  I didn't
find too much, but there where a number of comments about "deleting NULL
pointers so that XDR does not barf," for what that's worth. Good luck.

Paul Gilbert

 P.S.  0.49 with patch2a seems to be working really well. The most serious
problem for my time series library is now eigen() for non-symmetric matrices.


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