[Rd] specials issue, a heads up

[peter dalgaard]

Notice that the stats package contains the same issue: For some reason it defines an offset() function (for no particular reason, afaics) which just returns its argument. So

> x <- rnorm(10)
> y <- z <- 1:10
> lm(x~y+offset(z))

Call:
lm(formula = x ~ y + offset(z))

Coefficients:
(Intercept)            y  
     0.8253      -1.0840  

> lm(x~y+stats::offset(z))

Call:
lm(formula = x ~ y + stats::offset(z))

Coefficients:
     (Intercept)                 y  stats::offset(z)  
         0.82531          -0.08397                NA 

So I'm inclined to say that formulas are formulas and functions using formulas interpret functions and operators at their own convenience. You also deserve what you get from

> lm(x~base::`+`(y,z))

Call:
lm(formula = x ~ base::`+`(y, z))

Coefficients:
    (Intercept)  base::`+`(y, z)  
        0.82531         -0.04198  

-pd 

> On 24 Feb 2020, at 19:21 , Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan using gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On 24/02/2020 8:55 a.m., Therneau, Terry M., Ph.D. via R-devel 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?
> 
> I don't know how widely used survival::strata is versus the special strata (or cluster, or other specials).  If you were just introducing this now, I'd try to make sure that only one of those worked: don't have any functions matching the names of specials, or have functions that generate an error if you call them.  I did that in the much less widely used "tables" package, e.g. Heading() has special interpretation, and the Heading function is defined as
> 
> Heading <- function(name = NULL, override = TRUE,
>                    character.only = FALSE,
> 		    nearData = TRUE)
>    stop("This is a pseudo-function, not meant to be called.")
> 
> However, survival has far more users than tables does, so changing the name of your special functions or the corresponding regular functions could be a huge headache.
> 
> Perhaps there's a way to set a flag before evaluating the function in the formula, and generate a warning if survival::strata is called when it looks like the special function is intended.
> 
> Duncan Murdoch
> 
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-- 
Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
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