R annoyances
bogdan romocea wrote:
Prof Ripley, I'm aware of R CMD check, but who uses it? Not many regular users, I presume. As long as T/F are allowed to stand for TRUE/FALSE without being reserved words, there will be users who will fall in the trap.
If you don't use it, then you should. Putting your code in a package is a good idea even if you have no intention of showing it to anyone else, and check will flush out a lot of errors in package code and its documentation.
As your example shows, some code would have to be manually converted. Avoiding the difficult conversion may well be considered more important than ensuring that new/intermediate R users don't get into trouble. (After all, it's the experts who make the decisions, and who have a large investment in existing code.) From another perspective though, the total quantity of past, current - and especially future - T/F mistakes made by the new members of a rapidly increasing R user base may outweigh the difficulties the experts would have to go through to convert their code.
Users who don't follow good practices are going to run into trouble. What's so surprising about that? Duncan Murdoch