[Rd] specials issue, a heads up

[peter dalgaard]

<musing>
For some reason, I can't read this without thinking of the tech support guy going

"No, it is http:// ... aitch - tee - tee - pee - colon - AS IN WHERE YOUR HEAD IS - slash - slash ..."
</musing> 

-pd

> On 24 Feb 2020, at 18:26 , Ben Bolker <bbolker using gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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.
>>> 
>>> 
>>>        [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>> 
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>>> 
>> 
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>> 
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> 
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-- 
Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
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