save bug (PR#2418)

My apologies if these are known -- I'm new to R (moved over from S-Plus).

All on Windows NT GUI, R1.6.1 and associated packages.

1. save(x) gives the following error message:
Error in save(x) : `file' must be non-empty string

According to the save() help file, the empty string is the default.

Indeed it is.  And the default is to generate an error.  That's
deliberate, I understand.  The help file does say

    file: a connection or the name of the file where the data will be
          saved.  Must be a file name for workspace format version 1.

Since "" is none of the above, it is clearly erroneous.

I am not sure what to do to improve this: do you have any suggestions?

[That dump() chooses a meaningless filename and people persist in using in
(e.g. in S library sections) seems counter-productive to me.]

2. In the file>Display file GUI menu, if you try to display a file that is
in use by another application -- or at least one particular application I
use -- R crashes.

That's hard to debug. Do you get any useful feedback from a Dr.Mingw
or other dump?  My guess is that is a problem in msvcrt.dll, but I will
see if I can trigger it.  What Windows version, BTW?

3. I also have noticed that for ** SOME ** data sets I have, the relation=
argument of the scales= option for xyplot (in Lattice) only works for
relation='same' -- both 'free' and 'sliced' give error messages.
Unfortunately, it's not handy for me to go reproduce the error at the
moment, so I can't give the specifics. I'll send more details in future
unless told that this is already known about.

Lattice has been updated a couple of times recently.  If this persists
once R 1.6.2 is out (due in a week's time) we would want to see the
details.

Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595