[R] R annoyances

[Duncan Murdoch]

bogdan romocea wrote:
> Prof Ripley,
> 
> I'm aware of R CMD check, but who uses it? Not many regular users, I
> presume. As long as T/F are allowed to stand for TRUE/FALSE without
> being reserved words, there will be users who will fall in the trap.

If you don't use it, then you should.  Putting your code in a package is 
a good idea even if you have no intention of showing it to anyone else, 
and check will flush out a lot of errors in package code and its 
documentation.
> 
> As your example shows, some code would have to be manually converted.
> Avoiding the difficult conversion may well be considered more
> important than ensuring that new/intermediate R users don't get into
> trouble. (After all, it's the experts who make the decisions, and who
> have a large investment in existing code.) From another perspective
> though, the total quantity of past, current - and especially future -
> T/F mistakes made by the new members of a rapidly increasing R user
> base may outweigh the difficulties the experts would have to go
> through to convert their code.

Users who don't follow good practices are going to run into trouble. 
What's so surprising about that?

Duncan Murdoch