[R] [ and setMethod conflict?

[John Chambers]

Definitely something funny going on, but perhaps a little less sweeping
than your comments suggest.

No explanation at the moment, but a couple of clues.

1.  The problem doesn't seem to arise unless the data frame is large
enough.  I parametrized the 5000 rows in your example and couldn't get
the bizarre behavior until the number of rows was larger than 1000.

2.  There is some reason to think that nested "[" expressions are
related.  After rewriting your testFunc as follows, the random errors
seemed to go away.

testFunc <- function(cur) {
    ii <- order(cur[,1])
  sorted <- cur[ii,]
    ll <- !is.na(sorted[,1])
   sorted[ll,]
 }
(the change is just to pull out the subset expressions that were
arguments to other "[" expressions.)

I'm not an expert on R internals, but the combination of these might
suggest garbage collection taking place in nested calls to the dispatch
code for "[".

John Chambers

PS:  this thread might be more suited to r-devel than r-help.


"Bartz, Kevin" wrote:
> 
> I noticed this oddity about [ and setMethod.
> 
> First, I define testFunc, which sorts a data frame by the first column and
> returns the entries that aren't NAs, and testIt, which runs testFunc
> repeatedly on a random large data frame, each time saving the return into a
> dummy placeholder (for demonstration's sake).
> 
> > require(methods)
> Loading required package: methods
> [1] TRUE
> > testFunc <- function(cur) {
> +   sorted <- cur[order(cur[,1]),]
> +   sorted[!is.na(sorted[,1]),]
> + }
> > testIt <- function(num)
> +   for (i in 1:num) {
> +     cat("iteration", i, "...\n")
> +     dummy <- testFunc(as.data.frame(matrix(rnorm(5000 * 9),9)))
> +   }
> 
> Let's test out testIt.
> 
> > testIt(10)
> iteration 1 ...
> iteration 2 ...
> iteration 3 ...
> iteration 4 ...
> iteration 5 ...
> iteration 6 ...
> iteration 7 ...
> iteration 8 ...
> iteration 9 ...
> iteration 10 ...
> 
> So far, no problems. Next, I define myClass.
> 
> > setClass("myClass", representation(mySlot = "numeric"))
> [1] "myClass"
> > setMethod("[", signature(x = "myClass"),
> +           function(x, i, j, drop) "[ for myClass")
> [1] "["
> 
> Again, everything is fine. I've expanded [ to handle objects of class
> myClass. But when we attempt to use testIt now, problems emerge:
> 
> > testIt(10)
> iteration 1 ...
> Error in "[.data.frame"(cur, order(cur[, 1]), ) :
>         unused argument(s) (.Method ...)
> 
> Maybe that was just a fluke. Trying again, we get:
> 
> > testIt(10)
> iteration 1 ...
> iteration 2 ...
> Error in sorted[, 1] : incorrect number of dimensions
> 
> A different message every time, and the error seems no bug of mine (a
> .Method argument? What is that?). In fact, testIt produces a seemingly
> random response from R on each subsequent attempt--everything from
> successful execution to similarly ambiguous errors to a process-killing "Bus
> Error."
> 
> All in all, it seems that once I've defined a new method for [ I can no
> longer count on it to operate properly in any context.
> 
> Is this the intended behavior? And if so, is there any way I can have one
> class present that overloads [ and still use [ to reliably subset data
> frames?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Kevin
> 
> > R.version
>          _
> platform sparc-sun-solaris2.6
> arch     sparc
> os       solaris2.6
> system   sparc, solaris2.6
> status
> major    1
> minor    5.1
> year     2002
> month    06
> day      17
> language R
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-- 
John M. Chambers                  jmc at bell-labs.com
Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies    office: (908)582-2681
700 Mountain Avenue, Room 2C-282  fax:    (908)582-3340
Murray Hill, NJ  07974            web: http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/~jmc
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