[Rd] update.formula and backticked colons

[Sundar Dorai-Raj]

On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 2:30 PM, Sundar Dorai-Raj<sdorairaj at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 2:28 PM, Sundar Dorai-Raj<sdorairaj at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I just noticed the following in update.formula and I'm wondering if
>> this behavior is the intention of the developers. Here's an example:
>>
>> update(`a: b` ~ x, ~ . + y)
>>
>> Note now that the response has no backticks and is interpreted as a:b
>> (i.e. ":" is now an operator). This is because in update.formula the
>> call to terms.formula uses simplify = TRUE. I'm working with data that
>> has a lot of colons in their names and for reporting purposes I don't
>> want to use make.names to avoid this situation. I do have a solution
>> which simply avoids using update.formula, but I wonder if the
>> developers would consider removing the "simplify" argument and allow
>> it to be passed through "...", which is currently ignored by
>> update.formula. Alternatively, add a simplify=TRUE to the
>> update.formula call, which can manually be set to FALSE by the user.
>>
>> I would love to hear any comments or criticisms of my findings.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> --sundar
>>
>
> Forgot my version info
>
>> version
>               _
> platform       x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
> arch           x86_64
> os             linux-gnu
> system         x86_64, linux-gnu
> status
> major          2
> minor          9.1
> year           2009
> month          06
> day            26
> svn rev        48839
> language       R
> version.string R version 2.9.1 (2009-06-26)
>

This bounced on me so I don't know if it actually made it through.
Sorry if this is a repost.

--sundar