conflicts() and masked()

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Fri, 23 Oct 1998, Paul Gilbert wrote:

> >attach() and
> >library()      --- should check about conflicts and
> >                  warn on all of them [at least about masking of package:base].
> 
> If you do this please at least have an argument warn=T, so I can turn it off. I
> mask a lot of things on purpose and I don't want to list them every time.

I am in two minds about this. On S I do mask things a lot, and they are to
correct bugs/extend functionality. But S-PLUS is only released
occasionally, and many users have not bought updated versions.  With R I
tend only to mask things when developing replacement code, as I send
suggestions of enhanced versions that are (almost always) accepted
rapidly.  So I think an option to warn would be a good idea, but perhaps
defaulting to off.  With S-PLUS and our users, the problem is usually
long-forgotten objects in the current working directory, whereas I rarely
save R images for more than a few sessions. 

I have now contributed a version  of conflicts() that will appear in 
R-devel and hence 0.63.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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