[Rd] .Call not counting parameters consistently (PR#8450)

[Duncan Temple Lang]

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Coincidentally, I am in the process of working on a related aspect of
symbol resolution.

The issue is likely to be the caching of native symbols
that we do. We do not cache the registration information,
just the address of the routine.  And so the test is not
repeated.  We can fix this, but it will make things more
complex. This is a good example of where using the new mechanism
within namespaces to resolve the symbols when the package
is loaded and making them into regular R objects that
are passed to .Call/.C/... makes things more rational.
In that case, the caching is done in R and type information
is more directly available.


Off hand, I don't see why this would behave differently
on Windows and Unix, so I'd appreciate if you could let
us know the specific call that raises the error on Windows
and not on Unix.


D.


murdoch at stats.uwo.ca wrote:
> The R_registerRoutines C function allows the number of parameters to a
> .Call function to be registered.  For example, the tools package
> function md5sum() calls "Rmd5", which has been registered to require
> just one parameter.
> 
> But if it is called with the wrong number of parameters, only the first
> error gets caught:
> 
>   > library(tools)
>   > .Call("Rmd5",1,2,PACKAGE="tools")
> Error: Incorrect number of arguments (2), expecting 1 for Rmd5
>   > .Call("Rmd5",1,2,PACKAGE="tools")
> Error: argument 'files' must be character
> 
> This happens in Windows versions of R-patched and R-devel.  Charlie
> Geyer was bitten by this in his fuzzyRankTests package (version 0.3),
> which fails check because of it on Windows, but not on Unix.  I haven't
> done any testing on Unix.
> 
> I've traced into the do_dotcall function in src/main/dotcode.c, and I
> see that on the second call the "symbol.symbol.call" member is NULL, so
> no test is done, but I don't see why this is happening.  The
> resolveNativeRoutine function does some strange stuff.
> 
> Duncan Murdoch
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel

- --
Duncan Temple Lang                    duncan at wald.ucdavis.edu
Department of Statistics              work:  (530) 752-4782
4210 Mathematical Sciences Building   fax:   (530) 752-7099
One Shields Ave.
University of California at Davis
Davis,
CA 95616,
USA
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