On Fri, 20 May 2005, bogdan romocea wrote:
On 20-May-05 Uwe Ligges wrote:All possible changes to T/F (both removing the meaning of TRUE/FALSE in a clean session and making them reserved words) would break code of lots of users.
Just wanted to point out that there's another (darker) side to this: code that produces bad results without the users even realizing it. Personally, I would clearly prefer lots of broken code to mistakes caused by T/TRUE and F/FALSE.
You do realize that R CMD check checks for use of unassigned T/F? So it would only be unchecked code which did that.
Hypothetically, if whatever=T/F were forbidden and only whatever=TRUE/FALSE were allowed, all the code could be fixed with a simple sed script: for F in `ls *.r` do mv $F $F.$$ sed -e 's/=T,/=TRUE,/g' -e 's/=F,/=FALSE,/g' -e 's/=T)/=TRUE)/g' -e 's/=F)/=FALSE)/g' $F.$$ > $F rm $F.$$ done
I assure you it is a *lot* harder than that. Some of us use spaces for a start. No sed script can know the difference between
F <- "2"; as.numeric(x = F) F <- "2"; as.numeric(x = FALSE)
(I know because I used to share code bases for S-PLUS and R, and had Perl scripts to do the conversion that worked for my style, but not for some other authors' code.)
-- 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
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