good practice for values not provided
On 11/19/2006 3:46 PM, Tamas K Papp wrote:
Hi,
I am writing a collection of functions which I plan to share as a
package later (when they are tested thoroughly), so I would like to do
things "right" from the beginning...
I encountered a minor question of style. Consider a function
f <- function(a,b,x=NULL) {
## ...
}
if !is.null(x), f will use x to calculate the result, but if
is.null(x), it will do something else not involving x at all (using
any x would be meaningless here, so I can't use
x=calcsomethingfrom(a,b)).
What's the accepted way of indicating this in R with a default for x?
x=FALSE? x=NA? x=NULL?
I think the most common is x=NULL, but probably all of those are used in
some package. The advantage some default over no default and an
is.missing(x) test, is that you can write g to call f with the same default:
g <- function(a,b,c,d,x=NULL) {
f(a,b,x)
# some more stuff
}
It would be harder if you wanted to signal missing x by not including it
in the call, because you'd need a test in g.
Duncan Murdoch