I did not say "interfere"... I said "problems with consistency". I don't think
your wholesale import of functions without corresponding help pages is
consistent with the normal use of R, which will make reading R code written with
this mechanism in place a painful source of trouble for help forums.
On the other hand, if the code is prefaced with an environment name then there will
be no expectation that a help page should exist on the part of someone reading that
code for the first time. (It will be no less obscure, but at least it won't be
misleading.)
On April 7, 2020 9:40:02 AM PDT, Stefan Lenz IMBI <lenz at imbi.uni-freiburg.de>
wrote:
Thank you very much for your comment.
Could you elaborate how you think that it could interfere with the help
system?
I haven't yet connected the Julia help with the R help, as the R help
system is quite complex and RStudio handles it again differently. So
it's simply like the functions were declared on the command line. They
have no help.
A simply way to print the help for a Julia function, e.g. the function
"first", is to call
juliaEval("@doc first")
This then simply prints the output on the command line.
----------------urspr?ngliche Nachricht-----------------
Von: Jeff Newmiller [jdnewmil at dcn.davis.ca.us]
An: r-package-devel at r-project.org, Duncan Murdoch
[murdoch.duncan at gmail.com], Stefan Lenz IMBI
[lenz at imbi.uni-freiburg.de]
Datum: Mon, 06 Apr 2020 10:51:53 -0700
-------------------------------------------------
One could take the position that the library and require functions
to begin with and that all contributed packages should be accessed
one could recognize that these functions are an expected feature of R
point and then it is not defensible to ban the proposed approach of
names as Stefan wants to. I don't think it is fair to require this
specificity just because it involves use of attach.
That said, another feature of R packages is the integrated help
importing Julia functions wholesale may lead to problems with
navigating the help files. IMO it may be justifiable to ban this
syntactic convenience to maintain some separation in the minds of
for help on these new functions, since the syntactic and semantic
functions from another language may not align well with normal R
am not familiar with Julia or Stefan's package or the support it
area... I just disagree with banning a "library" lookalike function
because" it happens to involve attach.
On April 6, 2020 8:40:12 AM PDT, Duncan Murdoch
<murdoch.duncan at gmail.com>
On 06/04/2020 11:25 a.m., Stefan Lenz IMBI wrote:
Yes, as I wrote earlier, I would like to imitate the behaviour of
juliaUsing("SomeJuliaPackage") # exports myJuliaFunction
myJuliaFunction()
like R:
library("MyRPackage") # exports myRFunction
myRFunction()
I could return an environment, such that the call becomes
attach(juliaUsing("SomeJuliaPackage"))
myJuliaFunction()
I wouldn't use it that way. I'd write it as
sjp <- juliaUsing("SomeJuliaPackage")
sjp$myJuliaFunction()
This is similar to the advice to use pkg::foo() rather than
library(pkg)
followed by plain foo() in the code.
Duncan Murdoch
But calling juliaUsing(), as it is now, takes care that if a
is imported a second time,
the first data base is removed via detach().
This way, users do not have to worry about calling juliaUsing()
mutliple times in a script, same
as R users don't have to worry about calling library() multiple
If you call the code with attach() multiple times and do not
you get your screen cluttered with
warnings "xxx is masked by xxx".
So I would say it would decrease user-friendliness to return an
I also want to make explicit, that the call to attach
occurs only once in my code, after creating the environment:
envName <- paste0("JuliaConnectoR:", absoluteModulePath)
if (envName %in% search()) {
detach(envName, character.only = TRUE)
}
attach(funenv, name = envName)
This code is only called by juliaImport() and juliaUsing(), which
aren't called by any other function of
the package
and are supposed to be called directly by the user.
Stefan
----------------urspr?ngliche Nachricht-----------------
Von: Duncan Murdoch [murdoch.duncan at gmail.com]
An: Dirk Eddelbuettel [edd at debian.org], Ben Bolker
Kopie: List r-package-devel [r-package-devel at r-project.org]
Datum: Mon, 6 Apr 2020 11:00:09 -0400
-------------------------------------------------
On 06/04/2020 10:49 a.m., Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
On 6 April 2020 at 08:38, Ben Bolker wrote:
| Just reply to the CRAN maintainers and explain this situation.
| slightly buried, but the e-mail you received does say:
|
| > If you are fairly certain the rejection is a false positive,
| > message and explain.
True, but this misses the "Letter of the law" versus the "Spirit
It might be worth mentioning that use of attach() is seen, to
analogy, pretty much like use of global variables these days.
you could does not mean you should".
See e.g. one of the first google hits for 'r do not use attach'
I don't have a strong opinion on this: the proposed use seems to
worse than library() or require(). Those are fine for users to
are discouraged in a package. If the attach() never happens
explicit request from the user (and that's what it sounds like),
it's probably okay.
However, there is an easy workaround: just return the environment
without attaching it. Then the user has the choice of attaching
using it as a prefix when they call the functions in it. So it's
though this will destroy the utility of the package if Stefan
allowed to call attach().
Duncan Murdoch