A few more thoughts based on a simple question: how do you determine the length of a vector?
Rf_length() is used in example code in R-exts, but I don't think it's formally documented anywhere (although it's possible I missed it). Is using in an example sufficient to consider a function to be part of the public API? If so, SET_TYPEOF() is used in a number of examples, and hence used by CRAN packages, but is no longer considered part of the public API. Rf_xlength() doesn't appear to be mentioned anywhere in R-exts. Does this imply that long vectors are not part of the exported API? Or is there some other way we should be determining the length of such vectors? Are the macro variants LENGTH and XLENGTH part of the exported API? Are we supposed to use them or avoid them? Relatedly, I presume that LOGICAL() is the way we're supposed to extract logical values from a vector, but it isn't documented in R-exts, suggesting that it's not part of the public API? --- It's also worth pointing out where R-exts does well, with the documentation of utility functions ( https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-exts.html#Utility-functions). I think this is what most people would consider documentation to imply, i.e. a list of input arguments/types, the output type, and basic notes on their operation. --- Finally, it's worth noting that there's some lingering ill feelings over how the connections API was treated. It was documented in R-exts only to be later removed, including expunging mentions of it in the news. That's obviously water under the bridge, but I do believe that there is the potential for the R core team to build goodwill with the community if they are willing to engage a bit more with the users of their APIs. Hadley [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
