LazyLoad changes the class of objects

Yes, attributes are not preserved, though why that should matter
given the frequent strong recommendations in this list against
using attributes on environments or other reference objects is
beyond me. More importantly, locking and active bindings are not
preserved either.  Will look into fixing this this 2.7.

luke

On Fri, 12 Oct 2007, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:

Consider a package that this DESCRIPTION file:

---
Package: tester
Version: 0.1-0
Date: 2007-10-12
Title: Prototype object-based programming
Author: Gabor Grothendieck
Maintainer: Gabor Grothendieck <ggrothendieck at gmail.com>
Description: test
LazyLoad: true
Depends: R (>= 2.6.0)
License: GPL2
---

and a single subdirectory R containing tester.R which contains two lines:

---
e <- new.env()
class(e) <- c("x", "environment")
---

Now issue these commands:

library(tester)
class(tester::e)

[1] "environment"

R.version.string # Windows Vista

[1] "R version 2.6.0 Patched (2007-10-08 r43124)"


Note that the class of e was changed from what we set it to !!!

On the other handn, if we omit LazyLoad: true from the DESCRIPTION file
then it retains its original class.

# removed LazyLoad: true line from DESCRIPTION and reinstall pkg
# now its ok
library(tester)
class(tester::e)

[1] "x"           "environment"

--
Luke Tierney
Chair, Statistics and Actuarial Science
Ralph E. Wareham Professor of Mathematical Sciences
University of Iowa                  Phone:             319-335-3386
Department of Statistics and        Fax:               319-335-3017
    Actuarial Science
241 Schaeffer Hall                  email:      luke at stat.uiowa.edu
Iowa City, IA 52242                 WWW:  http://www.stat.uiowa.edu