apropos changes in r-devel: intended feature or bug?
I have not been followin this thread but if apropos is changed note that the Help | Apropos menu item in Windows may to be changed depending on what the change is.
On 12/22/06, Martin Maechler <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch> wrote:
Ok, so be it: We have seen that both apropos() and find() have used `some' non-standard evaluation up to R 2.4.1 which gave quite incosistent behavior. Getting rid of non-standard evaluation get's rid of all inconsistencies but of course is not back-compatible either. I'll do this. Martin
"Luke" == Luke Tierney <luke at stat.uiowa.edu>
on Fri, 22 Dec 2006 07:08:44 -0600 (CST) writes:
Luke> On Fri, 22 Dec 2006, Kurt Hornik wrote:
>>>>>>> Martin Maechler writes:
>>
>>>>>>> "DeepS" == Deepayan Sarkar <deepayan.sarkar at gmail.com> >>>>>>> on Thu, 21 Dec 2006 22:07:27 -0800 writes:
>>
DeepS> The old apropos started with: if DeepS> (!is.character(what)) what <- DeepS> as.character(substitute(what))
>>
DeepS> The new one has:
>>
DeepS> if (character.only) stopifnot(is.character(what)) DeepS> else what <- as.character(substitute(what))
>>
DeepS> i.e., the check for is.character(what) is DeepS> missing. This has the effect that 'what' can no DeepS> longer be a character string generated by a function DeepS> call unless 'character.only = TRUE'. I don't think DeepS> this was intended; the change makes previously valid DeepS> use invalid and I can't think of a situation where it DeepS> is useful.
>>
>>> [ Did you read the corresponding NEWS entry? ]
>>
>>> It now parallelizes the use in library() , require() etc, >>> and in particular does what the documentation says it does!
>>
>>> The old behavior was much less consistent and not according to >>> documentation:
>>
>>> apropos(lm) was equivalent to apropos("lm")
>>> but apropos(fit) gave an error.
>> >> I would actually prefer if we only had standard evaluation for apropos() >> and find(). >> >> (I understand we cannot do this for library() and help().)
Luke> I agree completely. If it is OK to make changes that make previous Luke> usage fail then it would be better to go to standard evaluation and Luke> let apropos(lm) fail. Luke> luke Luke> -- Luke> Luke Tierney Luke> Chair, Statistics and Actuarial Science Luke> Ralph E. Wareham Professor of Mathematical Sciences Luke> University of Iowa Phone: 319-335-3386 Luke> Department of Statistics and Fax: 319-335-3017 Luke> Actuarial Science Luke> 241 Schaeffer Hall email: luke at stat.uiowa.edu Luke> Iowa City, IA 52242 WWW: http://www.stat.uiowa.edu Luke> ______________________________________________ Luke> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list Luke> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
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