On 04/12/2020 8:13 a.m., Hiroaki Yutani wrote:
  Error: function '::' not supported in RHS call of a pipe

To me, this error looks much more friendly than magrittr's error.
Some of them got too used to specify functions without (). This
is OK until they use `::`, but when they need to use it, it takes
hours to figure out why

mtcars %>% base::head
#> Error in .::base : unused argument (head)

won't work but

mtcars %>% head

works. I think this is a too harsh lesson for ordinary R users to
learn `::` is a function. I've been wanting for magrittr to drop the
support for a function name without () to avoid this confusion,
so I would very much welcome the new pipe operator's behavior.
Thank you all the developers who implemented this!

I agree, it's an improvement on the corresponding magrittr error.

I think the semantics of not evaluating the RHS, but treating the pipe as purely syntactical is a good decision.

I'm not sure I like the recommended way to pipe into a particular argument:

  mtcars |> subset(cyl == 4) |> \(d) lm(mpg ~ disp, data = d)

or

  mtcars |> subset(cyl == 4) |> function(d) lm(mpg ~ disp, data = d)

both of which are equivalent to

  mtcars |> subset(cyl == 4) |> (function(d) lm(mpg ~ disp, data = d))()

It's tempting to suggest it should allow something like

  mtcars |> subset(cyl == 4) |> lm(mpg ~ disp, data = .)

which would be expanded to something equivalent to the other versions: but that makes it quite a bit more complicated. (Maybe _ or \. should be used instead of ., since those are not legal variable names.)

I don't think there should be an attempt to copy magrittr's special casing of how . is used in determining whether to also include the previous value as first argument.

Duncan Murdoch



Best,
Hiroaki Yutani

2020年12月4日(金) 20:51 Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.dun...@gmail.com>:

Just saw this on the R-devel news:


R now provides a simple native pipe syntax ‘|>’ as well as a shorthand
notation for creating functions, e.g. ‘\(x) x + 1’ is parsed as
‘function(x) x + 1’. The pipe implementation as a syntax transformation
was motivated by suggestions from Jim Hester and Lionel Henry. These
features are experimental and may change prior to release.


This is a good addition; by using "|>" instead of "%>%" there should be
a chance to get operator precedence right.  That said, the ?Syntax help
topic hasn't been updated, so I'm not sure where it fits in.

There are some choices that take a little getting used to:

  > mtcars |> head
Error: The pipe operator requires a function call or an anonymous
function expression as RHS

(I need to say mtcars |> head() instead.)  This sometimes leads to error
messages that are somewhat confusing:

  > mtcars |> magrittr::debug_pipe |> head
Error: function '::' not supported in RHS call of a pipe

but

mtcars |> magrittr::debug_pipe() |> head()

works.

Overall, I think this is a great addition, though it's going to be
disruptive for a while.

Duncan Murdoch

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