On Mar 21, 2013, at 10:48 AM, Terry Therneau wrote: > Note: My apolgies for the "Subject" in the original post > > On 03/21/2013 08:59 AM, Milan Bouchet-Valat wrote: >> Le jeudi 21 mars 2013 à 08:51 -0500, Terry Therneau a écrit : >>> I am not in favor of the change, which is a choice of rigor over usability. >>> >>> When I am developing code or functions I agree with this, and I view any >>> warnings from R >>> CMD check about shortened arguments as positive feedback. >>> >>> But 90% of my usage of R is day to day data analysis, interactive, at the >>> keyboard. A lot >>> of data sets that come to me have long variable names. What this change >>> will mean to me >>> is that I'll either spend a lot of time cursing at these annoying frickin >>> warnings, or >>> have to take the time to make new data sets (several times a week) that >>> have abbreviated >>> names. Of course when I come back to that project 8 weeks later I'll need >>> to recreate the >>> short-long mapping in my head... >>> >>> Let's think about WHY abbreviated names were allowed in the first place. >>> Usability is >>> worth a lot more than purity to the actual users of a package. S had the >>> rare advantage >>> of serious users just down the hall from the developers, which I >>> hypothesise is one of the >>> true foundation for it's success. (What user would have invented the >>> hiding aspect S4 >>> classes --- "let's put the results of the fit into a steel box so they >>> can't see the >>> parts" --- which is actually touted as a virtue? I cringe every time a new >>> method I need >>> is sewed up this way.) >>> >>> "C is a remarkable language. ... The success of C is due to a number of >>> factors, none of >>> them key, but all of them important. Perhaps the most significant of all is >>> that C was >>> developed by real practioners of programming and was designed for practical >>> day-to-day >>> use, not for show or for demonstration. Like any well-designed tool, it >>> falls easily to >>> the hand and feels good to use. Instead of providing constraints, checks >>> and rigorous >>> boundaries, it concentrates on providing you with power and on not getting >>> in your way." >>> Preface to "The C Book", M Banahan et al >> I would think that the ability to hit the Tab key to trigger name >> completion in your R GUI makes partial matching almost useless. The >> avantage of interactive completion in the GUI is that you immediately >> see the result of the partial matching. So you get the best of both >> worlds: no need to type long variable names in full, but no traps when a >> match is not what you would expect. >> >> Doesn't this suit your use case? > Good point. This works well at the command line. However, not when > interacting between emacs and R in the way I do. For reproducability I use > and emacs file that is being corrected and massaged with chunks submitted to > R; at the end I have a clean record of how the result was obtained. >
If this is really true (that ESS doesn't complete in R files) then this seems more like a bug (or wish?) report for ESS - other editors correctly support code completion in R documents - after all this is a feature of R, so they don't need to re-invent the wheel. Cheers, Simon >> >> >> Regards >> >>> Terry Therneau >>> >>> >>> On 03/21/2013 06:00 AM, r-devel-requ...@r-project.org wrote: >>>> Allowing partial matching on $-extraction has always been a source of >>>> accidents. >>>> Recently, someone who shall remain nameless tried names(mydata)<- "d^2" >>>> followed by >>>> mydata$d^2. As variables in a data frame are generally considered similar >>>> to variables >>>> in, say, the global environment, it seems strange that foo$bar can give >>>> you the content >>>> of foo$bartender. In R-devel (i.e., *not* R-3.0.0 beta, but 3.1.0-to-be) >>>> partial matches >>>> now gives a warning. Of course, it is inevitable that lazy programmers >>>> will have been >>>> using code like >>>>>> >>> >>> [[alternative HTML version deleted]] >>> >>> ______________________________________________ >>> R-devel@r-project.org mailing list >>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel >> > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
