[R] "privileged slots",

[Paul Gilbert]

Tony Plate wrote:

> At Tuesday 03:44 AM 6/1/2004, Jari Oksanen wrote:
>
>> > [snip]
>>  Anything can change in R without warning, and your code may
>> be broken anytime. Just be prepared.
>
> >[snip]
> One very helpful tool to deal with software updates is automated 
> testing.  I highly recommend it.  R comes with a testing framework. 

If you package up your code, and put lots of tests in the tests 
directory, and put lots of examples in the documentation, and put in 
demos for good measure, then it is really, really,  easy to test with 
beta versions of R. This not only  helps get any R bugs that affect you 
fixed before release, but also gives you considerable warning time when 
there are pending intended changes. Not only that, but if you put the 
package on CRAN then the testing all gets done for you automatically on 
several platforms, and on alpha versions, and sometimes even when R 
design changes are been considered. There is an extremely large payback 
from contributing to CRAN.

Paul Gilbert