[Rd] PR#10583

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Fri, 18 Jan 2008, michael.hoehle at gmail.com wrote:

> Thank you for your quick reply and for only indirectly scolding me for
> abusing the RBugs list. :-) However, I do think there is something
> funny in the 2.7.0 docu (or in the code). Things behave as expected and
> explained by you for version 2.6.0/2.6.1, but in the development
> version 2.7.0 (which I was using) the output is different (see below).

And so is the help page (Extract.Rd): I don't see anything here not 
working as documented in the version concerned.

> The CHANGES file does mention some changes about the [[ subsetting
> operator, partial matching and exact=TRUE, so I still think the
> documentation could be
> clearer at this point by mentioning abbreviations.

Do you mean the NEWS file?  (There is a CHANGES file, for Windows-specific 
changes.)

2.7.0 is not released (and will not be for ca 3 months), and its 
documentation is far from finalized.  We have asked that comments on 
unreleased versions be sent to the R-devel list and not R-bugs.

Whether an introductory document should mention what happens if you 
abbreviate names is moot: adding information in general makes introductory 
documents less clear, and mentioning something not considered to be good 
practice is also questionable at that level.  (We discourage partial 
matching for $, provide an option to warn about it and have tried to 
eliminate it in code and examples in base R.)

>
> ###################Version 2.6.0
>> sessionInfo()
> R version 2.6.0 Patched (2007-11-12 r43434)
> i386-apple-darwin8.10.1
>
> locale:
> C
>
> attached base packages:
> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base
>> control <- list(nameSpace=FALSE)
>> control$name
> [1] FALSE
>> control[["name"]]
> [1] FALSE
> Warning message:
> In control[["name"]] : partial match of 'name' to 'nameSpace'
>
> ###################Version 2.7.0 (development)
>> sessionInfo()
> R version 2.7.0 Under development (unstable) (2007-12-22 r43762)
> i386-apple-darwin8.10.1
>
> locale:
> C
>
> attached base packages:
> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base
>
>> control <- list(nameSpace=FALSE)
>> control$name
> [1] FALSE
>> control[["name"]]
> NULL
> ^^^^^
>
>
> Anyhow, with your help I found out that what I really wanted was
>
> control <- list(nameSpace=FALSE)
> if (is.null(control[["name",exact=TRUE]])) { control[["name"]] <- TRUE }
>
> Thank your for your help and best regards,
>
> Michael
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at 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 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595