Are you sure there is a measurable difference in calling methods directly? The dispatch overhead on formula (one of your uses) appears to be about 10 microseconds. (Note, negligible even for 10,000 bootstraps.)
I believe we took the real performance penalties into account (and namespaces had performance pluses as well as minuses). On Mon, 19 Jan 2004, Frank E Harrell Jr wrote: > On Mon, 19 Jan 2004 14:09:58 +0000 (GMT) > Prof Brian Ripley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > On Mon, 19 Jan 2004, Frank E Harrell Jr wrote: > > > > > On Sun, 18 Jan 2004 18:47:52 -0500 > > > Duncan Murdoch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > > > On Sat, 17 Jan 2004 09:33:10 -0500, you wrote: > > > > > > > > >I also share your views about namespaces. These have caused > > > > >numerous problems for me. It would be nice to have more of a > > > > >mechanism to put"feelers" out to the R user community when major > > > > >changes are planned. > > > > > > > > Changes always show up in r-devel (the main CVS branch, not the > > > > mailing list) first. Package developers should be keeping a > > > > relatively up to date copy of it around if they're doing things that > > > > are likely to break. > > > > > > I need to do that more often. But sometimes it's hard to know what > > > things I do that are likely to break. That's where there needs to be > > > some other mechanism for user communications. > > > > Well, there is a NEWS file that is worth consulting, and we (Kurt in > > particular) run all the CRAN packages after every major change and > > daily. See http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/checkSummary.html. We > > do also tend to tell package authors directly if their packages break, > > at least if they were previously warning-free. > > I will start checking NEWS. The kind of news I need though is more about > bugs that do not cause the package to break. > > > > > It seems the sort of thing you do is to call methods directly where you > > could equally well call the generic, since that is what is currently > > failing in Design and Hmisc (if survfit.km is a survfit method). > > The point of calling methods directly is efficiency, otherwise I would not > use this dirty practice. When bootstrapping or otherwise calling methods > repeatedly, I seek the lowest level functions for speed. This conflicts > with the namespace idea. I think this should have been taken into > consideration when designing namespaces. > > > > > > > >In Hmisc and Design I reference several functions that were not > > > > >exported from packages that now use namespaces. There is an > > > > >elegant > > > > That's not showing up in failures on the tests under R-patched. Of the > > listed dependencies only grid, lattice and survival have namespaces, and > > only survival has been added since 1.8.1. (I suspect the R-patched > > tests are against the 1.8.1 versions of the recommended packages, not > > the current versions.) > > Yes, those are the ones. > > > > > > > >solution with the package:::function notation, > > > > > > > > I'd recommend avoiding that as much as you can. If things aren't > > > > exported from a package, then the package writer is likely to feel > > > > free to change them without warning. It's much better to convince > > > > the package writer that they missed something in their export list. > > Right > > > > > > > That's a good solution in general, but I could see legitimate > > > disagreements about what should be exported, so this will not always > > > solve the problem. > > > > I think it does. If the package writer wants a function to be private, > > would-be users should respect that decision. Most of the cases we have > > encountered have been calling methods directly rather than coercing > > objects to the right class and calling the generic. In extremis, copy > > (with permission) the function you want from the package sources and > > rename it. > > That is a possibility. None of the approaches we've named are without > maintenance problems. What is the problem with coercing to the right class and calling the generic. -- Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/ University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self) 1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA) Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595 ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
