$ operator is invalid for atomic vectors, returning NULL

Dear all,
Starting from a recent version of R, the $ became "unusable"
on atomic vectors, e.g.

x <- c(a=1,b=2)
x$a

NULL
Warning message:
In x$a : $ operator is invalid for atomic vectors, returning NULL
 
I can of course do

x['a']

- but that requires more typing (5 characters rather than 2). 
 
Apologies if I've missed a an announcement regarding this, but
1) Is there an alternative to the ['a'] and
2) Why was this change made?

While Brian has answered your query from a more technical
point of view, there's an implication you should consider.

x$a always (as far as I know)[*] has been "unusable", in that
it returns NULL, and not what you expected to get. The only
thing that's (relatively) new is that you now get a warning.

[*] Certainly as early as R-1.6.2 (Jan 2003), as I've just checked.

Previously, you were not getting a warning.

So, if you were using the likes of x$a in code, and getting
no warnings, possibly your code was generating results
derived from NULL values rather than from the values you
expected it to be using. Perhaps you should check back!

Best wishes,
Ted.

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E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding at manchester.ac.uk>
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Date: 06-Dec-07                                       Time: 12:39:49
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