My problem with .RData almost a year ago is very similar to that of
attach in functions.
  If I remember correctly (I have not seen a .RData for a long time)
suppose that a .RData is loaded and contains a variable called y that
you have forgotten about (more probably you don't even notice that the
.RData was loaded).
  You create a dataframe (say read.table) containing a column labelled
y, planning to analyze the data. It is invisible because attached
behind the y from .RData and you unknowingly produce a completely
erroneous statistical analysis for your client or for publication.
(With luck, the two y's have incompatible lengths and a warning about
vectors not being multiples of each other's lengths will be produced -
when I had the problem, this warning was not yet available.)
  .RData is banned on our site.
  I do not think that functions should produce side effects (except
the few well-known ones). Attach should be local to a function and the
column names should not be hidden by objects outside its scope.
  For me, this question is now rather academic because I copy the
columns of the dataframe in the function instead of attaching (and
.RData never appears).
  Jim
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