R-devel Digest, Vol 121, Issue 20

I am not in favor of the change, which is a choice of rigor over usability.

When I am developing code or functions I agree with this, and I view any warnings from R 
CMD check about shortened arguments as positive feedback.

But 90% of my usage of R is day to day data analysis, interactive, at the keyboard.  A lot 
of data sets that come to me have long variable names.  What this change will mean to me 
is that I'll either spend a lot of time cursing at these annoying frickin warnings, or 
have to take the time to make new data sets (several times a week) that have abbreviated 
names.  Of course when I come back to that project 8 weeks later I'll need to recreate the 
short-long mapping in my head...

Let's think about WHY abbreviated names were allowed in the first place.  Usability is 
worth a lot more than purity to the actual users of a package.  S had the rare advantage 
of serious users just down the hall from the developers, which I hypothesise is one of the 
true foundation for it's success.  (What user would have invented the hiding aspect S4 
classes --- "let's put the results of the fit into a steel box so they can't see the 
parts" --- which is actually touted as a virtue?  I cringe every time a new method I need 
is sewed up this way.)

"C is a remarkable language.  ... The success of C is due to a number of factors, none of 
them key, but all of them important. Perhaps the most significant of all is that C was 
developed by real practioners of programming and was designed for practical day-to-day 
use, not for show or for demonstration. Like any well-designed tool, it falls easily to 
the hand and feels good to use. Instead of providing constraints, checks and rigorous 
boundaries, it concentrates on providing you with power and on not getting in your way."
    Preface to "The C Book", M Banahan et al

Terry Therneau


On 03/21/2013 06:00 AM, r-devel-request at r-project.org wrote:

Allowing partial matching on $-extraction has always been a source of accidents. 
Recently, someone who shall remain nameless tried names(mydata) <- "d^2" followed by 
mydata$d^2. As variables in a data frame are generally considered similar to variables 
in, say, the global environment, it seems strange that foo$bar can give you the content 
of foo$bartender. In R-devel (i.e., *not* R-3.0.0 beta, but 3.1.0-to-be) partial matches 
now gives a warning. Of course, it is inevitable that lazy programmers will have been 
using code like

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