[Rd] Creating an environment with attributes in a package

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 8:15 AM, Gabor Grothendieck
<ggrothendieck at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 8:08 AM, Jon Clayden <jon.clayden at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Dear all,
>>
>> I am trying to create an environment object with additional attributes, viz.
>>
>> Foo <- structure(new.env(), name="Foo")
>>
>> Doing this in a standard session works fine: I get the environment
>> with attr(,"name") set as expected. But if the same code appears
>> inside a package source file, I get just the plain environment with no
>> attributes set. Using a non-environment object works as I would expect
>> within the package (i.e. the attributes remain).
>>
>> I've looked through the documentation for reasons for this, and the
>> only thing I've found is the mention in the language definition that
>> "assigning attributes to an environment can lead to surprises". I'm
>> not sure if this is one of the surprises that the author(s) had in
>> mind! Could someone tell me whether this is expected, please?
>>
>> All the best,
>> Jon
>
> I had documented a few problems I found in R here:
>
>   http://r-proto.googlecode.com
>
> and you might want to go over them.  The item you mention is discussed
> in #1 there.  This was written some time ago and there may have been
> relevant changes to R since then so it would be a good idea to double
> check everything with the current version of R.
>

Here is a link directly to the part of that page that deals with R problems:

http://code.google.com/p/r-proto/#Avoiding_R_Bugs