[R] How to get the namespace of a function?

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 2/2/2006 5:56 PM, Berton Gunter wrote:
> Just echoing and slightly amplifying Gabor's comment...
> 
> The semantics of R are really based on functional programming (LISP-like)
> rather than OOP (JAVA-like)? R's behavior is "proper" from that point of
> view; what is "improper" is Fernando's expectation that it should behave
> some other way.

I don't think it's that so much as trying not to break old code.  It 
doesn't make sense to me that the search order within a namespace should 
pass through the global environment, but something would break if it 
didn't.  (I suspect it's probably the old S3 object system, which 
predates namespaces by a long time, but it's been a while since I've 
thought about this.)

Duncan Murdoch


 > Of course, one can simulate anything with a Turing machine,
> but I consider Fernando's criticisms somewhat "unfair" because he is
> expecting R to behave like something he is familiar with rather than as it
> was designed to. For this reason, what bothers him seems wholly desirable to
> me -- I want there to be well-defined scoping convention (lexical scoping)
> for R to find free variables.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Bert
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch
> [mailto:r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of Duncan Murdoch
> Sent: Thursday, February 02, 2006 2:16 PM
> To: fsaldanha at alum.mit.edu
> Cc: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: Re: [R] How to get the namespace of a function?
> 
> On 2/2/2006 5:05 PM, Fernando Saldanha wrote:
>> I am trying to imitate "encapsulation" from other languages like Java
>> or C++. Coming from that background, it bothers me that I can commit
>> errors like the following:
>>
>>> x <- 1
>>> f <- function(z) { y <- x; y + 1 } # Mistake: I should have written y <-
> z
>>> f(10)
>> [1] 2
>>
>> In a language like Java the interpreter would have noticed that x was
>> an undeclared variable and an error message would be issued. R, on the
>> other hand, allows the code to run, as x exists in the global
>> environment. I was trying to avoid such situations by  setting the
>> environment of f to be NULL. If there is a better way to catch this
>> type of errors I would be interested in knowing about it.
> 
> Put your code in a package, and use a namespace.  This isn't perfect, 
> but it gives you more control than you have when running scripts at the 
> console.
> 
> There's an article by Luke Tierney in one of R News 3/1 that explains 
> the search order when namespaces are involved.
> 
> Duncan Murdoch
>> FS
>>
>> On 2/2/06, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
>>> On 2/2/2006 10:56 AM, Fernando Saldanha wrote:
>>>> I declared the environment of the function myfun to be NULL as follows:
>>>>
>>>> environment(myfun) <- NULL
>>> Since version 2.1.0, it's been recommended that you use
>>>
>>> environment(myfun) <- baseenv()
>>>
>>> and since 2.2.0, you'll get a warning when using NULL (and you'll get an
>>> error in 2.3.0).  But why would you want to do that?  What are you
>>> trying to achieve?
>>>
>>> Duncan Murdoch
>>>
>>>
>>>> Later on I called that myfun and got an error message because the
>>>> function index() in the zoo package was called inside myfun and was
>>>> not visible:
>>>>
>>>> Error in myfun(args) : couldn't find function "index"
>>>>
>>>> I tried to use zoo::index() instead of index(), but that did not work.
>>>> In fact, zoo::index does not work even in the command line:
>>>>
>>>>> z<-ts(1:5)
>>>>> z
>>>> Time Series:
>>>> Start = 1
>>>> End = 5
>>>> Frequency = 1
>>>> [1] 1 2 3 4 5
>>>>> index(z)
>>>> [1] 1 2 3 4 5
>>>>> zoo::index(z)
>>>> Error in loadNamespace(name) : package 'zoo' does not have a name space
>>>>
>>>> How can I qualify index() so that it is visible inside the body of
> myfun?
>>>> Thanks for any suggestions,
>>>>
>>>> FS
>>>>
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