[Rd] should base R have a piping operator ?

[Jeff Ryan]

Is there some concrete example of your “many workflows don’t even make much
sense without pipes nowadays” comment?

I don’t think I’m opposed to pipes in the absolute, but as I am now deep
into my second decade of using R I’ve done just fine without them. As I
would guess have the vast majority of users and code that is used
throughout the world.

Jeff

On Sat, Oct 5, 2019 at 09:34 Ant F <antoine.fabri using gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear R-devel,
>
> The most popular piping operator sits in the package `magrittr` and is used
> by a huge amount of users, and imported /reexported by more and more
> packages too.
>
> Many workflows don't even make much sense without pipes nowadays, so the
> examples in the doc will use pipes, as do the README, vignettes etc. I
> believe base R could have a piping operator so packages can use a pipe in
> their code or doc and stay dependency free.
>
> I don't suggest an operator based on complex heuristics, instead I suggest
> a very simple and fast one (>10 times than magrittr in my tests) :
>
> `%.%` <- function (e1, e2) {
>   eval(substitute(e2), envir = list(. = e1), enclos = parent.frame())
> }
>
> iris %.% head(.) %.% dim(.)
> #> [1] 6 5
>
> The difference with magrittr is that the dots must all be explicit (which
> sits with the choice of the name), and that special magrittr features such
> as assignment in place and building functions with `. %>% head() %>% dim()`
> are not supported.
>
> Edge cases are not surprising:
>
> ```
> x <- "a"
> x %.% quote(.)
> #> .
> x %.% substitute(.)
> #> [1] "a"
>
> f1 <- function(y) function() eval(quote(y))
> f2 <- x %.% f1(.)
> f2()
> #> [1] "a"
> ```
>
> Looking forward for your thoughts on this,
>
> Antoine
>
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