On 24/02/2020 8:55 a.m., Therneau, Terry M., Ph.D. via R-devel wrote:
I recently had a long argument wrt the survival package, namely that the
following code
didn't do what they expected, and so they reported it as a bug
survival::coxph( survival::Surv(time, status) ~ age + sex +
survival::strata(inst),
data=lung)
a. The Google R style guide recommends that one put :: everywhere
b. This breaks the recognition of cluster as a "special" in the terms function.
I've been stubborn and said that their misunderstanding of how formulas work is
not my
problem. But I'm sure that the issue will come up again, and multiple other
packages
will break.
A big problem is that the code runs, it just gives the wrong answer.
Suggestions?
I don't know how widely used survival::strata is versus the special
strata (or cluster, or other specials). If you were just introducing
this now, I'd try to make sure that only one of those worked: don't
have any functions matching the names of specials, or have functions
that generate an error if you call them. I did that in the much less
widely used "tables" package, e.g. Heading() has special interpretation,
and the Heading function is defined as
Heading <- function(name = NULL, override = TRUE,
character.only = FALSE,
nearData = TRUE)
stop("This is a pseudo-function, not meant to be called.")
However, survival has far more users than tables does, so changing the
name of your special functions or the corresponding regular functions
could be a huge headache.
Perhaps there's a way to set a flag before evaluating the function in
the formula, and generate a warning if survival::strata is called when
it looks like the special function is intended.
Duncan Murdoch
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