I have three use cases in mind for an argument to load specifying which variables to load from the input 'file':
1. Avoid overwriting existing variables. ?load recommends using envir= or attach() to avoid overwrites. An argument like names= would allow even finer control to avoid collisions. 2. Avoid loading too many (in quantity or in memory size) variables from a large file. We might save dozens or hundreds of models to the same file and then load them more lazily. 3. Helping static analysis. Currently, when load() is used in a script, it becomes impossible to distinguish truly undefined variables from those defined implicitly by load(). With a names= argument, it can be possible to know statically precisely which names were introduced by load, and which might be a bug. (of course there's nothing stopping authors from having non-literal entries to names=, but that's a more general issue of static analysis). Michael Chirico ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
