[R] "Error: bad value" problem

[Rolf Turner]

On 18/12/2008, at 11:34 AM, Richard E. Chandler wrote:

> Dear R-help,
>
> Like several other subscribers, I have recently encountered a problem
> whereby R will execute code apparently correctly and without error,
> but any subsequent command will yield "Error: bad value" so that R
> has to be killed and restarted. We have checked this out with a few
> different operating systems (Windows XP/Vista and Linux) and with
> different versions of R. We have established the following:
>
> 1.	The error occurs with versions of R from 2.5.0 onwards on all the
> OSs we have tried, but not with earlier versions of R.
> 2.	The error is not reproducable between machines - identical code
> will fail at different points on two different machines.
> 3.	The error is not related to contributed packages, because our code
> doesn't use any. The code *does*, however, use repeated calls to
> optim() and nlm(), and passes several arguments through a sequence of
> functions using "...".
> 4.	Occasionally, we get an error relating to subset replacement
> instead of "Error:bad value". For example:
>
>> x <- rnorm(10)
>> x[1] <- 3
> Error in x[1] <- 3 : could not find function "[<-"
>
> 5.	The error behaviour changes as a result of minor modifications to
> print() statements in the code e.g. by inserting a line that prints
> the value of a well-defined variable.
>
> I suspect this really *is* a bug (particularly since it only started
> happening with version 2.5.0), but I figure it would be worth giving
> people a chance to tell me I'm an idiot before reporting it as such.
> In case anybody would like to try and see the error for themselves, I
> have uploaded some files to
> http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucakarc/Rtest/. The file ErrorDemo.r
> is the main script - see the file header there for more details.
> Files momfit.r and elmstats.dat are also required for this example to
> work. I'm sorry that it isn't a very simple example, but I haven't
> seen a simple illustration of the problem (and I couldn't find any
> examples in the list archives either).

I can confirm that the error occurs.

I downloaded the files and sourced ``ErrorDemo.R''. Doing x <- rnorm(10)
after doing so triggered the error.  Subsequently attempting traceback()
(or anything else) simply triggered the error again.

Good luck to R Core in tracking this down!

	cheers,

		Rolf Turner

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