[Rd] specials issue, a heads up

[Ben Bolker]

In the long run, coming up with a way to parse specials in formulas
that is both clean and robust is a good idea - annoying users are a
little bit like CRAN maintainers in this respect. I think I would
probably do this by testing identical(eval(extracted_head),
survival::Surv) - but this has lots of potential annoyances (what if
extracted_head is a symbol that can't be found in any attached
environment?  Do we have to start with if
(length(find(deparse(extracted_head))>0) ?

In the short run, a clear note in the documentation seems entirely sufficient.

On Mon, Feb 24, 2020 at 12:01 PM Hugh Parsonage
<hugh.parsonage using gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I mean if the person filing the bug regards style as more important than
> the truth of how R treats formulas then they’re literally talking in
> another language.
>
> I strongly recommend you do nothing or at most make a note in the
> documentation addressing this. Your time is too valuable.
>
> On Tue, 25 Feb 2020 at 12:56 am, Therneau, Terry M., Ph.D. via R-devel <
> r-devel using r-project.org> wrote:
>
> > I recently had a long argument wrt the survival package, namely that the
> > following code
> > didn't do what they expected, and so they reported it as a bug
> >
> >    survival::coxph( survival::Surv(time, status) ~ age + sex +
> > survival::strata(inst),
> > data=lung)
> >
> > a. The Google R style guide  recommends that one put :: everywhere
> > b. This breaks the recognition of cluster as a "special" in the terms
> > function.
> >
> > I've been stubborn and said that their misunderstanding of how formulas
> > work is not my
> > problem.   But I'm sure that the issue will come up again, and multiple
> > other packages
> > will break.
> >
> > A big problem is that the code runs, it just gives the wrong answer.
> >
> > Suggestions?
> >
> > Terry T.
> >
> >
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> >
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