Weird erratic error and illogical error message, could someone explain this?

Philippe Grosjean wrote:

Hello,

It's several days I try to track this bug, and even cannot cook a
reproducible example. Yet, it occurs consistently in a long-running
task after a variable period of time. Here is an example:

I would look closely at the other software that is running in your long
example. Does it include C (or other external) code? Look closely at
that, it might be writing outside it's own allocated memory. Also check
for correct protection of intermediate results, if you're producing
SEXPs in the external code. (Running under gctorture might flush out the
bug more quickly if the latter is the problem.)

If you're only running R code, then this looks like a bug in R, but it
might still be worth trying gctorture to make it reproducible. We won't
be able to fix it if we can't reproduce it.

Duncan Murdoch

... my long-running code [as I said, cannot give something simple
that produces this bug in a reproducible manner]

Error in match(x, table, nomatch = 0L) :
formal argument "nomatch" matched by multiple actual arguments

traceback()

6: match(x, table, nomatch = 0L)
5: "factor" %in% attrib[["class", exact = TRUE]]
4: structure(.Internal(Sys.time()), class = c("POSIXt", "POSIXct"))
3: Sys.time()
2: chemTrigger() at chemostat_1.0-1.R#1132
1: chemRun()

So, the culprid is a call inside `%in%` (from within structure() in
Sys.time()). But I can run millions times `%in%`, or structure(), or
Sys.time() on my machine without producing this bug. Arguments at 5:
are simple character strings. They don't hurt!

Also, I am lost because the message is totally illogical in the
context where it appears: I can understand this message here:

match(1, 2, nomatch = 0L, nomatch = NA)

Error in match(1, 2, nomatch = 0L, nomatch = NA) :
formal argument "nomatch" matched by multiple actual arguments

or here:

test <- function (...) match(1, ..., nomatch = 0L)
test(2, nomatch = NA)

Error in match(1, ..., nomatch = 0L) :
formal argument "nomatch" matched by multiple actual arguments

but in the call "match(x, table, nomatch = 0L)" where x is the
character string "factor" and table is another character string
("numeric") extracted from a list, I don't understand why it produces
this error message. '.Internal(Sys.time())' uses do_systime c code
that returns a one-element double... not something that can hurt here?!

Can someone explain me, or give me an example where an argument is NOT
duplicated in the call (well, as I understand it here) and where one
gets such an error message? And why?

Many thanks, I am desperate :-(

I got this error on R 2.11.1 on Mac OS X 10.6.4, and on R 2.10.1 on
Windows XP SP3 (but it does not matter, since I cannot cook a
reproducible example).

Philippe

P.S.: seems related to this:
http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu/Rhelp10/2008-June/165101.html