[R] Variable Scope

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Wed, 12 Apr 2006, James Kirkby wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I was wondering if there is a way to stop R looking outside the scope of
> a function, if it can't find the variable inside the function.
>
> I seem to waste hours debugging functions only to find I've used a wrong
> variable name somewhere, but the function still works because the
> variable exists higher up the hierachy. It seems it would be easier to
> debug if the function just went splat when it couldn't find the variable.

Sounds as if codetools (http://www.stat.uiowa.edu/~luke/R/codetools)
would help.  (You don't want to stop this in general, but this will tell 
you if symbols in your functions will not be visible locally.)

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595