update.default bugfix (PR#3288)
On Wed, 18 Jun 2003 minka@stat.cmu.edu wrote:
According to the man page for formula, "a formula object has an associated
environment". However, update.default doesn't use this environment, which
creates problems like the following:
make.model <- function(x) { lm(medv~.,x) }
library(MASS)
data(Boston)
fit = make.model(Boston)
fit = update(fit,".~.-crim")
# Object "x" not found
Update isn't going to satisfy everyone because people want it to do incompatible things. However, I don't think this is one of the things it should be able to do. In general the environment of a formula is used to look up variables in the formula, not the data= argument. (It's also used to look up the weights= and subset= arguments, but that is a horrible wart that we would like to excise). -thomas