[R] get() versus getAnywhere()

Duncan Murdoch murdoch at stats.uwo.ca
Sun Apr 19 11:45:11 CEST 2009


On 18/04/2009 8:47 PM, Rolf Turner wrote:
> On 17/04/2009, at 10:21 PM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> 
>> Benjamin Tyner wrote:
>>> Many thanks Duncan. Perhaps this merits a more explicit note in the
>>> documentation?
>>>
>> The quote I gave is from the documentation.  How could it be more  
>> explicit?
> 
> This is unfortunately typical of the attitude of R-core people toward  
> the
> documentation.  ``It's clear.'' they say.  ``It's explicit.''  Clear and
> explicit once you *know* what it's saying.  Not before, but.

But I didn't say that.  I asked how to make it more explicit.

> 
> In this case the documentation is quite opaque to me, and I would  
> suspect
> to a good many like me. 

What change would make it less opaque?

Duncan Murdoch

Now that you have made it *genuinely* explicit,
> I can understand what the documentation is saying.  Prior to that I  
> wouldn't
> have had a prayer of guessing that get() would sometimes find things  
> that
> getAnywhere() would not find.
> 
> Moreover, if getAnywhere() does not really mean ``get *anywhere*''  
> then its
> name is misleading.  Surely it wouldn't be too tough to modify  
> getAnywhere()
> so that it really got anywhere.  E.g. get it to call get() when it can't
> find an object with a given name?
> 
> 	cheers,
> 
> 		Rolf
> 
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