[Rd] Environment with no parent?

[Peter Dalgaard]

Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> writes:

> >(a) efficiency. Is it expensive no longer to have the base functions
> >bound directly to their symbol? (My gut feeling is that with suitable
> >hashing and cacheing, the penalty is minimal.)
> >
> >(b) you can *only* use get and simple variable retrieval in a non-base
> >environment with a NULL parent (eval(x <- 1, envir=foo) would give
> >'couldn't find function "<-"' or so). This could cause some confusion.
> 
> (b) means that the default should stay the way it is, but I think
> there should be a way to set up a truly empty environment.  We have a
> fair number of cases where envir=NULL is used, so it would be safest
> to make it a different value -- even if NULL is the obvious value for
> an empty environment.

Not necessarily. It just means that you should think about it. It is
not a given that envir=NULL really means what the author expected, and
fixing them up to read envir=.BaseEnv is probably quite doable.

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
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