Wish there were a "strict mode" for R interpreter. What

On 4/11/2011 8:46 AM, Simon Urbanek wrote:

On Apr 11, 2011, at 11:28 AM, Davor Cubranic wrote:

On 2011-04-09, at 2:08 PM, Ted Harding wrote:

I think the right thing to so is to introduce the students to the
basics of scoping, early in the process of learning R.

I know the basics of scoping perfectly well, but that doesn't stop 
me from occasionally misspelling a variable name that only causes an 
error much later.

OTOH, I think with Perl you can start declaring your variables 
"local" and keep the interpreter happy. But in R's context you then 
have to also start declaring what you expect to inherit from parent 
environments, and pretty soon the code is so encrusted with 
annotation barnacles that it loses the simplicity that  makes R so 
nice in the interactive mode.

What would be really nice is if we had a smart R editor/IDE that 
would "DWIM" and put a red underline under a misspelled name, but 
leave it alone when, as Duncan said, it's in the environment.

... which is, of course, impossible since the editor has no idea what 
environment you will evaluate the function in ... It can make 
assumptions but they may as wrong as the spurious warnings discussed 
so people will complain either way ;)

      For the record, my "complaint" stemmed from my inability to see 
a way to get rid of that message in that context.  In most cases, I've 
found that message to be very valuable in identifying latent bugs in 
code.  In that context, however, the message seemed inappropriate.  
Duncan privately suggested I add "LazyData:  yes" to the package 
DESCRIPTION file.  I did that, and the offending message disappeared!


      Thanks again to Duncan.


      Best Wishes,
      Spencer

Cheers,
Simon