[Rd] The enclosed environment does not work as expected

[Jiefei Wang]

Hi Eric,

Wow, Thanks for the explanation. Even though I know the lazy
evaluation, I never thought it can have this surprising effect. Good
to know it now.

Best,
Jiefei

On Sun, Apr 3, 2022 at 12:20 AM Eric Berger <ericjberger using gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Jiefei,
> This is related to "lazy evaluation". Alternatives for dealing with it are discussed here:
>
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29084193/how-to-not-fall-into-rs-lazy-evaluation-trap
>
> HTH,
> Eric
>
>
> On Sun, Apr 3, 2022 at 6:32 AM Jiefei Wang <szwjf08 using gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> It seems like the enclosed environment does not work well with the
>> loop. Here is a simple example
>> ```
>> FuncGenerator <- function(value){
>>     function() message(value)
>> }
>>
>> funcSets <- list()
>> for(i in 1:2)
>>     funcSets[[i]] <- FuncGenerator(i)
>>
>> environment(funcSets[[1]])$value
>> # [1] 2
>> environment(funcSets[[2]])$value
>> # [1] 2
>> ```
>> The output from the last two lines is simply 2. I expect the first
>> should be 1 and the second is 2. However, if I ask R to execute the
>> message function before accessing its environment, the result is
>> correct again.
>>
>> ```
>> FuncGenerator <- function(value){
>>     function() message(value)
>> }
>>
>> funcSets <- list()
>> for(i in 1:2)
>>     funcSets[[i]] <- FuncGenerator(i)
>>
>> ## Ask to evaluate the function
>> for(i in 1:2){
>>     funcSets[[i]]()
>> }
>> # 1
>> # 2
>> environment(funcSets[[1]])$value
>> # [1] 1
>> environment(funcSets[[2]])$value
>> # [1] 2
>> ```
>> This does not make any sense to me since the function simply prints
>> out its variable `value`. It should not change the value of the
>> variable, so I think this might be a bug in the code optimizer. This
>> issue can only be corrected by the loop(like the second example),
>> manually evaluating the function without the loop will give you the
>> same result as the first example.
>>
>> Here is my session information
>> > sessionInfo()
>> R version 4.1.2 (2021-11-01)
>> Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
>> Running under: Windows 10 x64 (build 19044)
>>
>>
>> Best,
>> Jiefei
>>
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