On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 12:51 PM, Jeroen Ooms <jeroenooms@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 6:37 AM, Gabriel Becker <gmbecker@ucdavis.edu>
> wrote:
> >
> > pkg::fun() will call function fun from the namespace of package pkg
> > *without loading it onto the search path*
>
> It is important to use conventional terminology here. The package (and
> its dependencies) gets loaded but not *attached*.


Well, yes, but AFAIK loaded but unattached namespaces don't do very much
that is going to affect the user running code. Symbols in such namespaces
are only reachable from within other namespaces, or via :: (or through some
get() based acrobatics, I suppose).


> The `library` and
> `require` functions load and attach a package in a single step. You
> can also manually attach and detach environments to/from the search
> path using the `attach` and `detach` functions.
>

You can, but it makes your code a nightmare from the maintenance,
readability, and  reproducibility of results perspectives.

~G

-- 
Gabriel Becker
Graduate Student
Statistics Department
University of California, Davis

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