[Rd] Depreciating partial matching

[Ben Bolker]

Terry Therneau <therneau <at> mayo.edu> writes:

>  To summarize: my own interactive mix of emacs/R may be unusual.
> For pure interactive folks completion does most of the work.  I
> hadn't tried the newest ESS interactive-within-emacs till today,
> it's slick as well.  The number of people howling will be less than
> my original thought, though not zero.

  For what it's worth I have a similar working style, although
I could probably train myself/adjust my working style if it came
to it.
 
>    Still, this change could cause a lot of grief for saved R
> scripts.  In our group the code + data directory is archived
> whenever a medical paper is submitted (close to 500/year), and it is
> very common to pull one back as is 1-4 years later for further
> exploration.  A very small subset of those are in a legal context
> where exact reproducability is paramount.

  Just to nitpick a bit -- as I think has been pointed out
before, if you *really* need exact reproducibility then you probably
need to be doing something more elaborate (e.g. saving complete
R+package installations/virtual machines).

  But I agree on the general point. (I don't envy R-core these
decisions -- but given how conservative they are generally, it
seems that they would be willing to consider being very careful
with this change as well.)