[R] I don't understand this

[Thomas Lumley]

On Wed, 3 Sep 2003, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:

> Another assignment-related thing I'm not clear on is what
>     f(x) <<- e
> is supposed to do.

Me neither.

>     f(x) <- e
> is equivalent to
>     x <- "f<-"(x, value=e)
> and
>     x <<- e
> assigns to x in the next outer environment,
> but a simple macro-expansion of
>     f(x) <<- e
> to
>     x <<- "f<-"(x, value=e)
> may have the nasty effect of writing to an outer x a value derived from
> an inner one.
>
> Now, that seems to be exactly what happens in R:
>
> > x <- c(1,2,3)
> > f <- function(x) x[2] <<- x
> > f(77)
> > x
> [1] 77 77
>
> While the documentation and source code _could_ tell me whether this
> is intentional, as far as I can tell (and I have, needless to say,
> looked) they _don't_.

I'm fairly confident that this is a case where there was no intention one
way or the other.

> Now, despite its misleading opening screen (which says that the
> target of an assignment is "a variable name (possibly quoted)",
> ?"<<-" goes on to say that
>         vvv
>      In all the assignment operator expressions, `x' can be a name or
>         ^^^
>      an expression defining a part of an object to be replaced (e.g.,
>      `z[[1]]').  The name does not need to be quoted, though it can be.
> (the arrows are my emphasis.)  So it's explict that f(x) <<- e is
> *supposed* to be allowed and I don't need to ask about that.

Well, it's possible that the documentation is wrong.

> The question is, what is f(x) <<- e supposed to do when there is an
> x in the current environment as well as one in an outer environment?
> It doesn't make much sense to fetch from one variable and store into
> the other, but that's what R actually does.  Is that really what's
> *supposed* to happen?

I don't think so.  <<- works as intended for subscripting of relatively
simple objects, but has the result you describe even for [.data.frame.

I think it's a bug.

	-thomas