If the recommendation is to write functions with an external editor (I mean, avoiding fix()), keep them as text files (*.R) and using source() to bring them into the R session, why not excluding, by default, function objects from save.image() ? In particular, from the final save.image(), the one that is proposed at q(). In this way, functions would not get included within .RData, I've made a personal misave() that excludes functions, but it might be a good idea having this as the default behaviour. Or perhaps, at least saving functions to a text file (.Rtext) and the rest of objects as rda (.RData). Just a suggestion. Agus Dr. Agustin Lobo Instituto de Ciencias de la Tierra (CSIC) Lluis Sole Sabaris s/n 08028 Barcelona SPAIN tel 34 93409 5410 fax 34 93411 0012 alobo at ija.csic.es -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._
save.image() excluding functions
2 messages · Agustin Lobo, Thomas Lumley
On Fri, 22 Feb 2002, Agustin Lobo wrote:
If the recommendation is to write functions with an external editor (I mean, avoiding fix()), keep them as text files (*.R) and using source() to bring them into the R session, why not excluding, by default, function objects from save.image() ? In particular, from the final save.image(), the one that is proposed at q(). In this way, functions would not get included within .RData,
There's a number of problems with excluding functions from .RData. Primarily 1/ compatibility. The S languages have never distinguished between functions and other forms of data in this way. 2/ Functions cannot necessarily be stored as text. They have environments, which could in principle reference any amount of data. The only completely reliable way for R to store a function is using save(). You as the author of a function can know that the environment is irrelevant but it's quite hard for R to know this (Luke Tierney's proposed byte-code compiler needs to be able to tell, so this may change) In fact the most common recommendation is not just that functions should be defined in external files but that everything else should be as well.
From that viewpoint .RData is just a convenient scratchpad to store
intermediate results without having to re-run them, and it really has to contain the entire state of the program. Anyone who really wants to modify save.image() in their own copy of R can do so, but I think it's unlikely that this change would be popular as a default. -thomas Thomas Lumley Asst. Professor, Biostatistics tlumley at u.washington.edu University of Washington, Seattle -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._