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new.env does not recognize parents from subclasses of "environment"

15 messages · Vitalie S., John Chambers, William Dunlap +3 more

#
Dear Developers,

A lot has been changed in the R12.0 with respect to behavior of "environment"
subclasses.  Many thanks for that.

One small irregularity, though; new.env does not allow the parent to be from S4
subclass.
[1] "myenv"
Error in new.env(parent = new("myenv")) : 'enclos' must be an environment

I wonder if this is a "planed" behavior.

The use of .xData  slot obviously works:
<environment: 063bb9e8>
Thanks,
Vitaly.
#
Thanks for the report.  Should now be fixed in r-devel and 2.12 
patched (rev 53383).

Please do report any cases where a subclass of environment doesn't 
work.  There are some known cases in locking and active binding, that 
will be fixed in due course.

The workaround for any such problem is usually as.environment().
On 10/20/10 3:17 AM, Vitaly S. wrote:
#
Here is an infinite recursion error  which occurs only with S4
subclasses assignment.

 setClass("myenv", contains = "environment")
#[1] "myenv"
 env <- new("myenv")
 env[[".me"]] <- env at .xData
#Error: evaluation nested too deeply: infinite recursion / options(expressions=)?
 

With basic types it works as expected:

env1 <- new.env()
env1[[".me"]] <- env1

May be this is related to active bindings that you mentioned,  but I am still
reporting it here.

Vitally.
#
Here is an infinite recursion error  which occurs only with S4
subclasses assignment.

 setClass("myenv", contains = "environment")
#[1] "myenv"
 env <- new("myenv")
 env[[".me"]] <- env at .xData
#Error: evaluation nested too deeply: infinite recursion / options(expressions=)?
 

With basic types it works as expected:

env1 <- new.env()
env1[[".me"]] <- env1

May be this is related to active bindings that you mentioned,  but I am still
reporting it here.

Vitally.
#
The traceback looks very similar to a problem
in R 2.11.1 reported earlier this month by Troy Robertson.
  > From: r-devel-bounces at r-project.org 
  > [mailto:r-devel-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of Troy Robertson
  > Sent: Wednesday, October 06, 2010 6:13 PM
  > To: 'r-devel at R-project.org'
  > Subject: Re: [Rd] Recursion error after upgrade to 
  > R_2.11.1[Sec=Unclassified]
It was due to a miscount of how many frames to go
up before evaluating an expression in
getMethod("[[<-",".environment") because setMethod()
introduced a local function in the new method.

Bill Dunlap
Spotfire, TIBCO Software
wdunlap tibco.com
#
This is a problem related to the introduction of exact= into the [[ 
and [[<- functions. As Bill says, the current method misuses 
eval.parent() when that argument is added.

However, a simpler and more efficient solution is to migrate the checks 
for subclasses of "environment" used in other base code into the code 
for [[<- (and for $<-), at which point the methods for these functions 
are no longer needed.

A solution on these lines is being tested now and will find its way into 
r-devel and 2.12 patched.

One other point about the original posting:

Please don't use constructions like env at .xData. This depends on the 
current implementation and is not part of the user-level definition. Use 
as(env, "environment") or equivalent. (In this case, the assignment of 
the object's own environment was irrelevant to the error.)

John Chambers
On 10/21/10 9:21 AM, William Dunlap wrote:
#
Yet another inconsistency. environment<- does not work with S4:
[1] "myenv"
Error in environment(tf) <- env : 
  replacement object is not an environment


Vitally.


John Chambers <jmc4 at stanford.edu> writes:
#
You need to update your version of R (r-devel or 2.12 patched) to rev
53385 or later, and read NEWS, particularly the line:


- Assignment of an environment to functions or as an attribute to other
objects now works for subclasses of "environment".
On 10/22/10 10:20 AM, Vitally S. wrote:
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John Chambers <jmc4 at stanford.edu> writes:
I am following the news in daily snapshots from here
ftp://ftp.stat.math.ethz.ch/Software/R
and  the above line is still not in the NEWS of today's version.

Thanks for the patch. Looking forward to the stable release.

Vitally.
#
Looks like those ETH pages were nnot updated after the R-2.12.0 release 
(they do not show current R-tached / R-devel), hence CCing Martin Maechler.

Best,
Uwe Ligges
On 22.10.2010 21:54, Vitally S. wrote:
#
On 23.10.2010 17:08, Uwe Ligges wrote:
... which I actually do now...

Uwe
#
2010/10/23 Uwe Ligges <ligges at statistik.tu-dortmund.de>:
Hmm, but why?
The daily snapshot page *does* show the current R-patched and R-devel
tar balls ?

Or what were you talking about ?

Regards,
Martin
#
On 23.10.2010 17:25, Martin Maechler wrote:
We are talking about the

http://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/

page. R-devel NEWS show R-2.12.0, just as on example.

Uwe
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On 10/23/2010 05:27 PM, Uwe Ligges wrote:
You need to get NEWS from $BUILDDIR these days. Anything left in $SRCDIR
is probably a relic.
#
On Sat, Oct 23, 2010 at 18:23, Peter Dalgaard <pdalgd at gmail.com> wrote:
Thank you Uwe.   The other e-mail cited John mentioning the ./Software/ page.
Indeed those are outdated.

and for about 6 weeks.
The reason has been  ssh host keys changed, disabling a cron job to
run the updates...

I hope this will be ok, within a couple of hours.
Yes, of course, but that has not been the problem here.

Thank you Peter (and Uwe)
Martin