[Rd] Deprecating partial matching in $.data.frame

Hadley Wickham h.wickham at gmail.com
Wed Mar 20 16:23:34 CET 2013


On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 7:28 AM, peter dalgaard <pdalgd at gmail.com> wrote:
> Allowing partial matching on $-extraction has always been a source of accidents. Recently, someone who shall remain nameless tried names(mydata) <- "d^2" followed by mydata$d^2.
>
> As variables in a data frame are generally considered similar to variables in, say, the global environment, it seems strange that foo$bar can give you the content of foo$bartender.
>
> In R-devel (i.e., *not* R-3.0.0 beta, but 3.1.0-to-be) partial matches now gives a warning.

Just for data frames, or also for lists?

I think this is a fantastic change, but I do worry a little that it is
going to generate warnings for a _lot_ of existing code.

Hadley

-- 
Chief Scientist, RStudio
http://had.co.nz/



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