[Rd] Underscores in package names

[Ben Bolker]

  Creeping code complexity ...

  I like to think that the cuteR names will have a Darwinian
disadvantage in the long run. FWIW Hadley Wickham argues (rightly, I
think) against mixed-case names:
http://r-pkgs.had.co.nz/package.html#naming. I too am guilty of picking
mixed-case package names in the past.  Extra credit if the package name
and the standard function have different cases! e.g.
glmmADMB::glmmadmb(), although (a) that wasn't my choice and (b) at
least it was never on CRAN and (c) it wasn't one of the cuteR variety.

  Bonus points for the first analysis of case conventions in existing
CRAN package names ... I'll start.

> a1 <- rownames(available.packages())
> cute <- "[a-z]*R[a-z]*"
> table(grepl(cute,a1))

FALSE  TRUE
12565  2185


On 2019-08-09 2:00 p.m., neonira Arinoem wrote:
> Won't it be better to have a convention that allows lowercase, dash,
> underscore and dot as only valid characters for new package names and keep
> the ancient format validation scheme for older package names?
> 
> This could be implemented by a single function, taking a strictNaming_b_1
> parameter which defaults to true. Easy to use, and compliance results will
> vary according to the parameter value, allowing strict compliance for new
> package names and lazy compliance for older ones.
> 
> Doing so allows to enforce a new package name convention while also
> insuring continuity of compliance for already existing package names.
> 
> Fabien GELINEAU alias Neonira
> 
> Le ven. 9 août 2019 à 18:40, Kevin Wright <kw.stat using gmail.com> a écrit :
> 
>> Please, no.  I'd also like to disallow uppercase letters in package names.
>> For instance, the cuteness of using a capital "R" in package names is
>> outweighed by the annoyance of trying to remember which packages use an
>> upper-case letter.
>>
>> On Thu, Aug 8, 2019 at 9:32 AM Jim Hester <james.f.hester using gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Are there technical reasons that package names cannot be snake case?
>>> This seems to be enforced by `.standard_regexps()$valid_package_name`
>>> which currently returns
>>>
>>>    "[[:alpha:]][[:alnum:].]*[[:alnum:]]"
>>>
>>> Is there any technical reason this couldn't be altered to accept `_`
>>> as well, e.g.
>>>
>>>   "[[:alpha:]][[:alnum:]._]*[[:alnum:]]"
>>>
>>> I realize that historically `_` has not always been valid in variable
>>> names, but this has now been acceptable for 15+ years (since R 1.9.0 I
>>> believe). Might we also allow underscores for package names?
>>>
>>> Jim
>>>
>>> ______________________________________________
>>> R-devel using r-project.org mailing list
>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Kevin Wright
>>
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