[Rd] The default behaviour of a missing entry in an environment

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 7:21 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
> On 13/11/2009 6:39 PM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
>>
>> Note that one should use inherits = FALSE argument on get and exists
>> to avoid returning objects from the parent, the parent of the parent,
>> etc.
>
> I disagree.  Normally you would want to receive those objects.  If you
> didn't, why didn't you set the parent of the environment to emptyenv() when
> you created it?
>

$ does not look into the parent so if you are trying to get those
semantics you must use inherits = FALSE.

> x <- 3
> e <- new.env()
> "x" %in% names(e)
[1] FALSE
> get("x", e) # oops
[1] 3