Gabor Grothendieck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > ?bquote says it returns an expression but, in fact, it typically > (though not always) returns a call object: > > > class(bquote(a+b)) > [1] "call" > > > class(bquote(1)) > [1] "numeric"
Unevaluated expressions and objects of mode "expression" are not the same thing. The latter is effectively a list wrapping one or more of the former. Unevaluated expressions are generally mode "call", except when they are constants. They do, however, correspond to expressions as syntactic element (look for "expr" inside gram.y in the sources). The terminology does not seem completely rationalised, see also the help pages for expression() and substitute()/quote(), and it might be worth cleaning it up at some point. Just requires someone with a sufficiently clear mind to decide on issues like whether constants qualify as "unevaluated calls"... (my hunch is that they don't, and that "unevaluated expressions" should be used throughout, but my mind is definitely not clear these days.) Another question is whether it would be desirable for bquote to return an "expression" object. I realized recently that > boxplot(rnorm(99),ylab=quote(a[1])) Error in title(ylab = a[1]) : object "a" not found and that you need expression(a[1]) instead. I think this implies that you'd have to use as.expression(bquote(....)) which is a bit nasty. I'm not sure this isn't a bug in boxplot, though. -- O__ ---- Peter Dalgaard Øster Farimagsgade 5, Entr.B c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics PO Box 2099, 1014 Cph. K (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen Denmark Ph: (+45) 35327918 ~~~~~~~~~~ - ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) FAX: (+45) 35327907 ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
