[Rd] Avoiding name clashes: opinion on best practice naming conventions

Janko Thyson janko.thyson.rstuff at googlemail.com
Wed Feb 16 10:29:16 CET 2011


Dear List,

I'm trying to figure out some best practice way with respect to the naming
conventions when building own packages.

I'd like to minimize the risk of choosing function names that might
interfere with those of other packages (both available ones and those yet to
come).

I came up with following alternatives
1. Prefixing the actual names (e.g. myPkgfoo() instead of foo()): pretty
verbose
2. Emulating a package namespace while developing and explicitly using
myPkg::foo() in all scripts: IMHO the best way, but apparently not possible
as I learned. 
3. Carefully choosing which functions to export. Yet, I'm not sure I
completely understand the implications of exported functions. Does this
imply that not exported functions cannot interfere with functions in other
namespaces?

I'd be great to hear some recommendations on this one!

Thanks a lot,
Janko



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