[Rd] Underscores in package names

[Jan Gorecki]

Thanks Abby and Martin,

In every company I worked using R - 3 in total - there was at least
one (up to ~10) processes designed (dev and implemented) to depend on
current package naming scheme, having underscore as separator of
package name and its version. From my experience I believe this is a
(very?) common practice. I also use it myself.
Arguments for having underscore in package names are simply weak.
Dot in function names is an entirely different issue caused by S3
dispatch. No need to look at other OOP languages, it is R.
Package name is not a function name.
There are no practical gains.
There is nothing wrong in having package "a.pkg" and function "a_pkg()".

Regards,
Jan Gorecki


On Fri, Aug 16, 2019 at 1:20 AM Abby Spurdle <spurdle.a using gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > While
> > package names are not functions, using dots in package names
> > encourages the use of dots in functions, a dangerous practice.
>
> "dangerous"...?
> I can't understand the necessity of RStudio and Tiny-Verse affiliated
> persons to repeatedly use subjective and unscientific phrasing.
>
> Elegant, Advanced, Dangerous...
> At UseR, there was even "Advanced Use of your Favorite IDE".
>
> This is not science.
> This is marketing.
>
> There's nothing dangerous about it other than your belief that it's
> dangerous.
> I note that many functions in the stats package use dots in function names.
> Your statement implies that the stats package is badly designed, which it
> is not.
> Out of 14,800-ish packages on CRAN, very few of them are even close to the
> standard set by the stats package, in my opinion.
>
> And as noted by other people in this thread, changing naming policies could
> interfere with a lot of software "out there", which is dangerous.
>
> > Dots in
> > names is also one of the common stones cast at R as a language, as
> > dots are used for object oriented method dispatch in other common
> > languages.
>
> I don't think the goal is to copy other OOP systems.
> Furthermore, some shells use dot as the current working directory and Java
> uses dots in package namespaces.
> And then there's regular expressions...
>
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