[R] [Rd] R 4.4.0 is released

Peter Dalgaard via R-announce r-@nnounce @end|ng |rom r-project@org
Wed Apr 24 07:18:02 CEST 2024


The build system rolled up R-4.4.0.tar.gz and R-4.4.0.tar.xz (codename "Puppy Cup") this morning.

This is a major update, containing many new features and bug fixes.

The list below details the changes in this release. 

You can get the source code from

https://cran.r-project.org/src/base/R-4/R-4.4.0.tar.gz
https://cran.r-project.org/src/base/R-4/R-4.4.0.tar.xz

or wait for it to be mirrored at a CRAN site nearer to you.

Binaries for various platforms will appear in due course.


For the R Core Team,

Peter Dalgaard


These are the checksums (md5 and SHA-256) for the freshly created files, in case you wish
to check that they are uncorrupted:

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This is the relevant part of the NEWS file

CHANGES IN R 4.4.0:

  SIGNIFICANT USER-VISIBLE CHANGES:

    * Startup banners, R --version, sessionInfo() and R CMD check no
      longer report (64-bit) as part of the platform as this is almost
      universal - the increasingly rare 32-bit platforms will still
      report (32-bit).

      On Windows, ditto for window titles.

    * is.atomic(NULL) now returns FALSE, as NULL is not an atomic
      vector.  Strict back-compatibility would replace is.atomic(foo)
      by (is.null(foo) || is.atomic(foo)) but should happen only
      sparingly.

  NEW FEATURES:

    * The confint() methods for "glm" and "nls" objects have been
      copied to the stats package.  Previously, they were stubs which
      called versions in package MASS. The MASS namespace is no longer
      loaded if you invoke (say) confint(glmfit).  Further, the "glm"
      method for profile() and the plot() and pairs() methods for class
      "profile" have been copied from MASS to stats.  (profile.nls()
      and plot.profile.nls() were already in stats.)

    * The confint() and profile methods for "glm" objects have gained a
      possibility to do profiling based on the Rao Score statistic in
      addition to the default Likelihood Ratio. This is controlled by a
      new test = argument.

    * The pairs() method for "profile" objects has been extended with a
      which = argument to allow plotting only a subset of the
      parameters.

    * The "glm" method for anova() computes test statistics and
      p-values by default, using a chi-squared test or an F test
      depending on whether the dispersion is fixed or free.  Test
      statistics can be suppressed by giving argument test a false
      logical value.

    * In setRepositories() the repositories can be set using their
      names via name = instead of index ind =.

    * methods() and .S3methods() gain a all.names option for the (rare)
      case where functions starting with a . should be included.

    * Serializations can now be interrupted (e.g., by Ctrl-C on a
      Unix-alike) if they take too long, e.g., from save.image(),
      thanks to suggestions by Ivan Krylov and others on R-devel.

    * New startup option --max-connections to set the maximum number of
      simultaneous connections for the session.  Defaults to 128 as
      before: allowed values up to 4096 (but resource limits may in
      practice restrict to smaller values).

    * R on Windows (since Windows 10 2004) now uses the new Segment
      Heap allocator. This may improve performance of some
      memory-intensive applications.

    * When R packages are built, typically by R CMD build <pkg>, the
      new --user=<build_user> option overrides the (internally
      determined) user name, currently Sys.info()["user"] or LOGNAME.
      This is a (modified) fulfillment of Will Landau's suggestion in
      PR#17530.

    * tools::testInstalledBasic() gets new optional arguments outDir
      and testSrcdir, e.g., allowing to use it in a <builddir> !=
      <srcdir> setup, and in standard "binary" Windows installation
      *if* a source tests/ folder is present.

    * range(<DT_with_Inf>, finite = TRUE) now work for objects of class
      "Date", "POSIXct", and "POSIXlt" with infinite entries,
      analogously to range.default(), as proposed by Davis Vaughan on
      R-devel.  Other range()-methods can make use of new function
      .rangeNum().

    * New .internalGenerics object complementing .S3PrimitiveGenerics,
      for documentation and low-level book-keeping.

    * grid() now invisibly returns the x- and y- coordinates at which
      the grid-lines were drawn.

    * norm(., type) now also works for complex matrices.

    * kappa(., exact = TRUE, norm = *) now works for all norms and also
      for complex matrices.  In symmetric / triangular cases, the new
      argument uplo = "U" | "L" allows the upper or lower triangular
      part to be specified.

    * memDecompress(type = "unknown") recognizes compression in the
      default 'zlib' format as used by memCompress(type = "gzip").

    * memCompress() and memDecompress() will use the libdeflate library
      (<https://github.com/ebiggers/libdeflate>) if installed.  This
      uses the same type of compression for type = "gzip" but is 1.5-2x
      faster than the system libz library on some common platforms: the
      speed-up may depend on the library version.

    * diff() for objects of class "Date", "POSIXct", and "POSIXlt"
      accepts a units argument passed via ....

    * Dynamic help now does a much better job of rendering package
      DESCRIPTION metadata.

    * Rprof() gains an event argument and support for elapsed (real)
      time profiling on Unix (PR#18076).

    * filled.contour() gains a key.border argument.

    * tools::update_pkg_po() gets arguments pot_make and mo_make for
      _not_ re-making the corresponding files, and additionally a
      verbose argument.

    * Hexadecimal string colour specifications are now accepted in
      short form, so, for example, we can use "#123", which is
      equivalent to "#112233".

      Thanks to MikeFC for the original idea and Ella Kaye, Malcolm
      Barrett, George Stagg, and Hanne Oberman for the patch.

    * Plain-text help shows \var markup by angle brackets.

    * The new experimental primitive function declare() is intended to
      eventually allow information about R code to be communicated to
      the interpreter, compiler, and code analysis tools. The syntax
      for declarations is still being developed.

    * Functions psmirnov(), qsmirnov() and rsmirnov() in package stats
      have had argument two.sided renamed to alternative, to take into
      account that the permutation distributions of the one-sided
      statistics can be different in the case of ties.  Consequence of
      PR#18582.

    * sort() is now an implicit S4 generic in methods.

    * Formatting and printing, format(z), print(z), of complex vectors
      z no longer zap relatively small real or imaginary parts to zero,
      fixing PR#16752.  This is an API change, as it was documented
      previously to round real and imaginary parts together on purpose,
      producing nicer looking output.  As mentioned, e.g. in the PR,
      this change is compatible with many other "R-like" programming
      environments.

      We have simplified the internal code and now basically format the
      real and imaginary parts independently of each other.

    * New experimental functions Tailcall() and Exec() to support
      writing stack-space-efficient recursive functions.

    * Where characters are attempted to be plotted by pdf(),
      postscript() and xfig() which are not in the selected 8-bit
      character set (most often Latin-1) and the R session is using a
      UTF-8 locale, the warning messages will show the UTF-8 character
      rather than its bytes and one dot will be substituted per
      character rather than per byte.  (Platforms whose iconv() does
      transliteration silently plot the transliteration.)

      In a UTF-8 locale some transliterations are now done with a
      warning (e.g., dashes and Unicode minus to hyphen, ligatures are
      expanded, permille (‰) is replaced by o/oo), although the OS may
      have got there first.  These are warnings as they will continue
      to be replaced by dots in earlier versions of R.

    * The matrix multiplication functions crossprod() and tcrossprod()
      are now also primitive and S3 generic, as %*% had become in R
      4.3.0.

    * source() and example() have a new optional argument catch.aborts
      which allows continued evaluation of the R code after an error.

    * The non-Quartz tiff() devices allow additional types of
      compression if supported by the platform's libtiff library.

    * The list of base and recommended package names is now provided by
      tools::standard_package_names().

    * cairo_pdf() and cairo_ps() default to onefile = TRUE to closer
      match pdf() and postscript().

    * New option catch.script.errors provides a documented way to catch
      errors and then continue in non-interactive use.

    * L %||% R newly in base is an expressive idiom for the phrases
      if(!is.null(L)) L else R or if(is.null(L)) R else L.

    * The return value from warnings() now always inherits from
      "warnings" as documented, now also in the case of no warnings
      where it previously returned NULL.

    * as.complex("1i") now returns 0 + 1i instead of NA with a warning.

    * z <- c(NA, 1i) now keeps the imaginary part Im(z[1]) == 0, no
      longer coercing to NA_complex_.  Similarly, cumsum(z) correctly
      sums real and imaginary parts separately, i.e., without
      "crosstalk" in case of NAs.

    * On Alpine Linux iconv() now maps "latin2", "latin-2", "latin9"
      and "latin-9" to encoding names the OS knows about
      (case-insensitively).

    * iconv(sub = "Unicode") now always zero-pads to four (hex) digits,
      rather than to 4 or 8.  (This seems to have become the convention
      once Unicode restricted the number of Unicode points to 2^21 - 1
      and so will never need more than 6 digits.)

    * NCOL(NULL) now returns 0 instead of 1, for consistency with
      cbind().

    * The information for the Euro glyph missing from the Adobe .afm
      files for the Courier, Helvetica and Times families has been
      copied from their URW equivalents - this will improve vertical
      centring in the pdf() and postscript() devices.

    * The included BLAS sources have been updated to those shipped with
      LAPACK version 3.12.0.  The changes are almost entirely cosmetic.

    * The included LAPACK sources have been updated to version 3.12.0
      and some further double-complex routines added.

    * There are new font families for the 2014--5 URW 2.0 fonts (see
      ?pdf) which are included in recent versions of Ghostscript.
      These have font widths for most Greek glyphs and a few others
      which were missing from the original versions (whose font
      families remain available for reproducibility, although
      Ghostscript-based viewers will render using the 2.0 versions).

    * Improve the large-n efficiency of as.matrix(<dist>), thanks an R
      contributors effort, notably by Tim Taylor and Heather Turner,
      see PR#18660.

    * The default and numeric methods of all.equal() get a check.class
      option.

    * zapsmall() gets new optional arguments, function mFUN and min.d,
      for extra flexibility; fulfills a wish in PR#18199.  Also, it is
      now an implicit S4 generic in package methods.

    * The Rd filter for aspell() gains an ignore argument.

    * New generic function sort_by(), primarily useful for the
      data.frame method which can be used to sort rows of a data frame
      by one or more columns.

    * The icence headers for the RPC code in src/extra/xdr have been
      updated to use the GPL-compatible licence published by Oracle
      America in 2010.

    * New function pkg2HTML() in tools to create single-page HTML
      reference manuals for R packages.

    * The byte code evaluator now uses less C stack space for recursive
      calls to byte-compiled functions. It also makes more of an effort
      to avoid allocations for scalar return values.

    * New completion option backtick (disabled by default) allows
      non-syntactic completions to be wrapped in backquotes. This is
      currently only useful for Jupyter notebooks via the IRkernel
      package, and may cause problems for other backends.

  INSTALLATION:

    * The parser has been updated to work with bison 3.8.2, which is
      now used for the pre-generated parsers in gram.c, file.c, and
      gramRd.c. A few parser error messages have changed, which may
      affect code that relies on exact messages.

  INSTALLATION on a UNIX-ALIKE:

    * System valgrind headers are now required to use configure option
      --with-valgrind-instrumentation with value 1 or 2.

    * configure will warn if it encounters a 32-bit build, as that is
      nowadays almost untested.

    * Environment variable R_SYSTEM_ABI is no longer used and so no
      longer recorded in etc/Renviron (it was not on Windows and was
      only ever used when preparing package tools).

    * If the libdeflate library and headers are available, libdeflate
      rather than libz is used to (de)compress R objects in lazy-load
      databases.  Typically tasks spend up to 5% of their time on such
      operations, although creating lazy-data databases is one of the
      exceptions.

      This can be suppressed if the library is available by the
      configure option --without-libdeflate-compression.

    * configure option --enable-lto=check has not worked reliably since
      2019 and has been removed.

    * The minimum autoconf requirement for a maintainer build has been
      increased to autoconf 2.71.

      It is intended to increase this to 2.72 for R 4.5.0: the
      distributed configure file was generated using 2.72.

    * The minimum version requirement for an external LAPACK has been
      reduced to 3.9.0.

    * No default C++ compiler is set if no C++17 compiler is detected:
      there is no longer an automatic fallback to C++14 or C++11.

      Compilers from the last five years should have sufficient
      support: for others macros CXX and CXXSTD can be set in file
      config.site to provide a fallback if needed.

      The Objective-C++ compiler now by default uses the standard
      selected by R for C++ (currently C++17) rather than the default
      standard for the C++ compiler (which on macOS is still C++98).

  INSTALLATION on macOS:

    * A new configure option --with-newAccelerate makes use of Apple's
      'new' BLAS / LAPACK interfaces in their Accelerate framework.
      Those interfaces are only available in macOS 13.3 or later, and
      building requires SDK 13.3 or later (from the Command Line Tools
      or Xcode 14.3 or later).

      By default the option uses new Accelerate for BLAS calls: to also
      use it for LAPACK use option --with-newAccelerate=lapack.  The
      later interfaces provide LAPACK 3.9.1 rather than 3.2.1: 3.9.1 is
      from 2021-04 and does not include the improved algorithms
      introduced in LAPACK 3.10.0 (including for BLAS calls).

  INSTALLATION on WINDOWS:

    * The makefiles and installer scripts for Windows have been
      tailored to Rtools44, an update of the Rtools43 toolchain.  It is
      based on GCC 13 and newer versions of MinGW-W64, binutils and
      libraries (targeting 64-bit Intel CPUs).  R-devel can no longer
      be built using Rtools43 without changes.

    * Rtools44 has experimental support for 64-bit ARM (aarch64) CPUs
      _via_ the LLVM 17 toolchain using lld, clang/flang-new and
      libc++.

  UTILITIES:

    * R CMD check notes when S4-style exports are used without
      declaring a strong dependence on package methods.

    * tools::checkRd() (used by R CMD check) detects more problems with
      \Sexpr-based dynamic content, including bad nesting of \Sexprs
      and invalid arguments.

    * tools::checkRd() now reports Rd titles and section names ending
      in a period; this is ignored by R CMD check unless environment
      variable _R_CHECK_RD_CHECKRD_MINLEVEL_ is set to -5 or smaller.

    * R CMD check now notes Rd files without an \alias, as long
      documented in 'Writing R Extensions' §1.3.1.  The check for a
      missing \description has been moved from tools::checkRd() to
      tools::checkRdContents().

    * R CMD check now visits inst/NEWS.Rd and OS-specific man
      subdirectories when checking Rd files.

    * tools::checkDocFiles() and tools::checkRdContents() now also
      check internal Rd files by default, but "specially" (ignoring
      missing documentation of arguments).

    * R CMD Rdiff gets option --useEx.

    * R CMD check now warns on non-portable uses of Fortran KIND such
      as INTEGER(KIND=4) and REAL(KIND=8).

      To see the failing lines set environment variable
      _R_CHECK_FORTRAN_KIND_DETAILS_ to a true value.

    * When checking Rd files, R CMD check now notes some of the "lost
      braces" that tools::checkRd() finds.  Typical problems are Rd
      macros missing the initial backslash (e.g., code{...}), in-text
      set notation (e.g., {1, 2}, where the braces need escaping), and
      \itemize lists with \describe-style entries of the form
      \item{label}{description}.

    * R CMD INSTALL (and hence check) will compile C++ code with
      -DR_NO_REMAP if environment variable _R_CXX_USE_NO_REMAP_ is set
      to a true value.  It is planned that this will in future become
      the default for compiling C++.

    * The new built-in Rd macro \dontdiff{} can be used to mark example
      code whose output should be ignored when comparing check output
      to reference output (tests/Examples/<pkg>-Ex.Rout.save).  The
      \dontdiff tag, like \donttest, is _not_ shown on the rendered
      help page, so provides a clean alternative to ##
      IGNORE_RDIFF_(BEGIN|END) comments.

    * R CMD build when there is no NAMESPACE, now uses the recommended
      exportPattern("^[^.]"), instead of exporting everything.

    * R CMD check now warns about non-ASCII characters in the NAMESPACE
      file (in addition to R files). Such packages are not portable and
      may fail to install on some platforms.

  C-LEVEL FACILITIES:

    * Headers R_ext/Applic.h and R-ext/Linpack.h used to include
      R_ext/BLAS.h although this was undocumented and unneeded by their
      documented entry points.  They no longer do so.

    * New function R_missing(), factored out from do_missing(), used to
      fix PR#18579.

    * SEXP type S4SXP has been renamed to OBJSXP to support
      experimenting with alternative object systems.  The S4SXP value
      can still be used in C code but is now deprecated.  Based on
      contributions from the R Consortium's Object-Oriented Programming
      Working Group.

    * New function pow1p(x,y) for accurate (1+x)^y.

    * mkCharLenCE was incorrectly documented to take a size_t length
      but was implemented with int (and character strings in R are
      limited to 2^31 - 1 bytes).

  DEPRECATED AND DEFUNCT:

    * data() no longer handles zipped data from long-defunct (since R
      2.13.0) --use-zip-data installations.

    * The legacy graphics devices pictex() and xfig() are now
      deprecated.  They do not support recent graphics enhancements and
      their font handling is rudimentary. The intention is to retain
      them for historical interest as long as they remain somewhat
      functional.

    * Support for encoding = "MacRoman" has been removed from the pdf()
      and postscript() devices - this was a legacy encoding supporting
      classic macOS up to 2001 and no longer has universal libiconv
      support.

    * is.R() is deprecated as no other S dialect is known to be in use
      (and this could only identify historical dialects, not future
      ones).

      Further information on calls can be obtained by setting the
      environment variable _R_DEPRECATED_IS_R_ to error which turns the
      deprecation warning into an error and so by default gives a
      traceback.  (This is done by R CMD check --as-cran.)

    * UseMethod() no longer forwards local variables assigned in the
      generic function into method call environments before evaluating
      the method body. This makes method calls behave more like
      standard function calls and makes method code easier to analyze
      correctly.

    * The twelve as.data.frame.<class>() methods which were deprecated
      only via _R_CHECK_AS_DATA_FRAME_EXPLICIT_METHOD_ and in R CMD
      check --as-cran are formally deprecated now in favour of calling
      as.data.frame() or as.data.frame.vector().  The deprecation
      "check" now works also when as.data.frame() is S4 generic thanks
      to Ivan Krylov.

    * The default method for the directional comparison operators <, >,
      <=, and >= now signals an error when one of the operands is a
      language object, i.e. a symbol or a call.

    * For terms.formula(), deprecate abb and neg.out arguments
      _formally_ in addition to just documenting it.

  BUG FIXES:

    * The methods package is more robust to not being attached to the
      search path.  More work needs to be done.

    * pairwise.t.test() misbehaved when subgroups had 0 DF for
      variance, even with pool.sd = TRUE.  (PR#18594 by Jack Berry).

    * Probability distribution functions [dpq]<distrib>(x, *), but also
      bessel[IKJY](x, .) now consistently preserve attributes(x) when
      length(x) == 0, e.g., for a 2 x 0 matrix, thanks to Karolis
      Koncevičius' report PR#18509.

    * Group "Summary" computations such as sum(1:3, 4, na.rm = 5, NA,
      7, na.rm = LL) now give an error instead of either 17 or NN for
      LL true or false, as proposed by Ivan Krylov on the R-devel
      mailing list.  (This also means it is now an error to specify
      na.rm more than once.)

    * as.complex(x) now returns complex(real = x, imaginary = 0) for
      _all_ numerical and logical x, notably also for NA or
      NA_integer_.

    * Directories are now omitted by file.copy(, recursive = FALSE) and
      in file.append() (PR#17337).

    * gsub() and sub() are now more robust to integer overflow when
      reporting errors caused by too large input strings (PR#18346).

    * Top-level handlers are now more robust to attempts to remove a
      handler whilst handlers are running (PR#18508).

    * The handling of Alt+F4 in dialogs created on Windows using
      GraphApp has been fixed (PR#13870).

    * density() more consistently computes grid values for the
      FFT-based convolution, following Robert Schlicht's analysis and
      proposal in PR#18337, correcting density values typically by a
      factor of about 0.999.  Argument old.coords = TRUE provides back
      compatibility.

    * palette.colors() gains a name argument that defaults to FALSE
      controlling whether the vector of colours that is returned has
      names (where possible).  PR#18529.

    * tools::xgettext() no longer extracts the (non-translatable) class
      names from warningCondition and errorCondition calls.

    * S3method(<gen>, <class>, <func>) in the NAMESPACE file now works
      (again) when <func> is visible from the namespace, e.g.,
      imported, or in base.

    * getParseData(f) now also works for a function defined in the
      first of several <pkg>/R/*.R source files, thanks to Kirill
      Müller's report and Duncan Murdoch's patch in PR#16756.

    * Rd \Sexpr macros with nested #ifdef conditionals were not
      processed.

    * A non-blocking connection with non-default encoding (such as a
      socket) now correctly returns from readLines() after new data has
      arrived also when its EOF had been reached previously.  Thanks to
      Peter Meilstrup's report on R-devel and Ivan Krylov's report and
      patch proposal in PR#18555.

    * tools::checkRdContents() failed to detect empty argument
      descriptions when they spanned multiple lines, including those
      generated by prompt().  These cases are now noted by R CMD check.

    * Plain-text help no longer outputs spurious colons in the
      arguments list (for multi-line \item labels in the Rd source).

    * kappa() and rcond() work correctly in more cases; kappa(., norm =
      "2") now warns that it computes the 1-norm with (default) exact =
      FALSE; prompted by Mikael Jagan's quite comprehensive PR#18543.

    * Rd skeletons generated by prompt() or promptData() now use a
      dummy title (so R CMD build works).  tools::checkRdContents() has
      been updated to detect such template leftovers, including from
      promptPackage().

    * When S4 method dispatch fails because no method was found, the
      error message now includes the signature argument names; thanks
      to Michael Chirico's proposal on the R-devel list.

    * withAutoprint({ .. }) now preserves srcrefs previously lost,
      thanks to Andrew Simmons' report plus fix in PR#18572.

    * transform.data.frame() no longer adjusts names; in particular,
      untransformed variables are kept as-is, including those with
      syntactically invalid names (PR#17890).

    * The keep.source option for Rd \Sexpr blocks is no longer ignored.

    * The formula methods for t.test() and wilcox.test() now catch when
      paired is passed, addressing PR#14359; use Pair(x1, x2) ~ 1 for a
      paired test.

    * The level reported in the browser prompt was often too large. It
      now shows the number of browser contexts on the stack.

    * For cbind() and rbind(), the optional deparse.level argument is
      now properly passed to methods, thanks to Mikael Jagan's PR#18579
      and comments there.

    * Some error and warning messages for large ('long vector')
      matrix(v, nr, nc) and dim(m) <- d are now correct about sizes,
      using long long formatting, fixing PR#18612 (and more) reported
      by Mikael Jagan.

    * readChar(useBytes = TRUE) now terminates strings even when the
      underlying connection uses extra spaces in the input buffer.
      This fixes problems with extra garbage seen with gzip
      connections, PR#18605.

    * Named capture in PCRE regular expressions now works also with
      more than 127 named groups (PR#18588).

    * Datetime functions are now robust against long jumps when dealing
      with internal time zone changes.  This avoids confusing warnings
      about an invalid time zone, previously triggered by turning
      warnings into errors or handling them via tryCatch (PR#17966,
      PR#17780).

    * Datetime functions now restore even an empty TZ environment
      variable after internal time zone changes (PR#17724).  This makes
      results of datetime functions with this (typically unintentional)
      setting more predictable.

    * drop.terms(*) now drops response as by default, keep.response =
      FALSE, fixing PR#18564 thanks to Mikael Jagan.

    * dummy.coef(.) now also works for lm()-models with character
      categorical predictor variables rather than factor ones, fixing
      PR#18635 reported by Jinsong Zhao.

    * formals(f) <- formals(f) now also works for a function w/o
      arguments and atomic _constant_ body(f).

    * Correct as.function(<invalid list>, .)'s error message.

    * removeSource() is yet more thorough in finding and removing
      "srcref" and the other source references from parsed R language
      chunks, fixing PR#18638 thanks to Andrew Simmons.

    * dgeom() is more accurate now, notably when its result is very
      small, fixing PR#18642 thanks to the proposal of Morten Welinder,
      also improving other instances where C level binom_raw(x, n, ..)
      has x == 0 or x== n.

    * warning() with options(warn = 1) has improved output for
      multi-line messages.

    * axis.Date() and axis.POSIXct() now respect the par("lab") setting
      for the number of pretty() intervals.

    * Comparisons for language objects (which are based on deparsing)
      are now more careful about using accurate deparsed results
      (PR#18676).

    * Plain-text help (Rd2txt) now correctly preserves blank lines
      following single-line \dontrun code.

    * <POSIXlt>[*] no longer sets wrong "balanced" attribute, fixing
      PR#18681 thanks to Mikael Jagan.

    * str(<classed-call>) now deparses the call as expected, fixing
      PR#18684, reported by Dave Slager.

    * In Rd examples, code following the closing brace of a \dontrun,
      \dontshow or \donttest tag on the same line is no longer skipped
      when R CMD check runs the examples.

    * as.data.frame(matrix(*, ncol=0)) now gets valid names() and
      colnames(); reported by Davis Vaughan on the R-devel list.

    * Internal Mathlib function stirlerr(n) is now almost fully
      (52-bit) accurate for all n >= ~5.9 and more accurate also in the
      range 1 -- 5.9.  This entails small ("after 12th decimal")
      changes in density functions, e.g., dgamma() in _some_ regions of
      their support.  The fix was partly prompted by Morten Welinder's
      PR#18640.

    * Numbers like 9876543.2 are now considered non-integer by Mathlib
      internal R_nonint(), amending original fix of PR#15734.

    * Rd comment lines no longer cause broken paragraphs in the
      rendered PDF and plain-text help. In code blocks, pure comment
      lines (starting with %) no longer produce an empty line.

    * xtabs(Freq ~ .) now consistently defaults to na.action = na.pass,
      using na.rm = FALSE (added as an argument) when summing over Freq
      (PR#17770).

    * tools::testInstalledPackage() is no longer silent about failures
      from running examples or tests and its return code no longer
      ignores failures from checking vignettes.

-- 
Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Phone: (+45)38153501
Office: A 4.23
Email: pd.mes using cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd using gmail.com

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