Message-ID: <dc01448f-2de2-34cd-4215-ebb676f22fdb@gmail.com>
Date: 2021-01-21T23:05:04Z
From: Duncan Murdoch
Subject: Why is rm(list=ls()) bad practice?
In-Reply-To: <338857e8-f4f4-7d75-477c-80ec295af2e9@gmail.com>
On 21/01/2021 5:20 p.m., J C Nash wrote:
> In a separate thread Jeff Newmiller wrote:
>> rm(list=ls()) is a bad practice... especially when posting examples. It doesn't clean out everything and it removes objects created by the user.
>
> This query is to ask
>
> 1) Why is it bad practice to clear the workspace when presenting an example?
> I'm assuming here that people who will try R-help examples will not run them in the
> middle of something else, which I agree would be unfortunates.
I think that's exactly the concern. I doubt it would have happened in
this instance, but in other cases, people might copy and paste a
complete example before reading it. It's safer to say: "Run this code
in a clean workspace:", rather than cleaning it out yourself.
Duncan Murdoch
However, one of the
> not very nice aspects of R is that it is VERY easy to have stuff hanging around (including
> overloaded functions and operators) that get you into trouble, and indeed make it harder
> to reproduce those important "minimal reproducible examples". This includes the .RData
> contents. (For information, I can understand the attraction, but I seem to have been
> burned much more often than I've benefited from a pre-warmed oven.)
>
> 2) Is there a good command that really does leave a blank workspace? For testing
> purposes, it would be useful to have an assured blank canvas.
Yes, start R with
R --vanilla
Duncan Murdoch
>
> This post is definitely not to start an argument, but to try to find ways to reduce
> the possibilities for unanticipated outcomes in examples.
>
> Cheers, JN
>
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> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>