getAttr problem

It seems that getAttr doesn't return "names" attribute properly as in

Is this getAttrib?

getAttrib(x, R_NamesSymbol));

Really?  As it is widely used inside R, that seems implausible.

If you look at section 4.7.4 in "Writing R Extensions", the second example of
SEXP out(SEXP, SEXP) returns NULL for the names attribute of the 
outer product. 

But the outer product is a matrix and does not have names, so NULL is 
correct.

This is true for  R 1.7.0 on both Win2000 with mingw and Redhat 9.0 with gcc.

Well, the source code is the same for both systems, so that is not 
surprising (and BTW `mingw' is on ix86 port of gcc, and RH9 (no .0?) 
uses another ix86 port of gcc).

Is there something I am missing?

Yes: could you supply a complete example with the results you get and an 
explanation as to why you think it is wrong?

Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at 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