>>>>> Hervé Pagès
>>>>> on Tue, 26 May 2020 12:38:13 -0700 writes:
> Hi Martin, On 5/26/20 06:24, Martin Maechler wrote: ...
>>
>> What about remaining back-compatible, not only to R 3.y.z
>> with default recycle0=FALSE, but also to R 4.0.0 with
>> recycle0=TRUE
> What back-compatibility with R 4.0.0 are we talking about?
> The 'recycle0' arg was added **after** the R 4.0.0 release
> and has never been part of an official release yet.
Yes, of course. It was *planned* for R 4.0.0 and finally was
too late (feature freeze etc)... I'm sorry I was wrong and
misleading above.
> This is the time to fix it.
Well, R 4.0.1 is already in 'beta' and does contain it too.
So the "fix" should happen really really fast, or we (R core)
take it out from there entirely.
>> *and* add a new option for the Suharto-Bill-Hervé-Gabe
>> behavior, e.g., recycle0="sep.only" or just
>> recycle0="sep" ?
> OMG!
>> As (for back-compatibility reasons) you have to specify
>> 'recycle0 = ..' anyway, you would get what makes most
>> sense to you by using such a third option.
>>
>> ? (WDYT ?)
> Don't bother. I'd rather use
> paste(paste(x, y, z, sep="#", recycle0=TRUE), collapse=",")
> i.e. explicitly break down the 2 operations (sep and
> collapse). Might be slightly less efficient but I find it
> way more readable than
> paste(x, y, z, sep="#", collapse=",", recycle0="sep.only")
> BTW I appreciate you trying to accomodate everybody's
> taste. That doesn't sound like an easy task ;-)
> I'll just reiterate my earlier comment that controlling
> the collapse operation via an argument named 'recycle0'
> doesn't make sense (collapse involves NO recycling). So I
> don't know if the current 'recyle0=TRUE' behavior is "the
> correct one" but at the very least the name of the
> argument is a misnomer and misleading.
> More generally speaking using the same argument to control
> 2 distinct operations is not good API design. A better
> design is to use 2 arguments. Then the 2 arguments can
> generally be made orthogonal (like in this case) i.e. all
> possible combinations are valid (4 combinations in this case).
I don't disagree about the principle...
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