Hello R experts,
I plan to develop a tool for dynamic analysis of R programs. I would like to
trace function calls at runtime, capturing argument and return values.
Following a suggestion made some time ago on this list, my high-level
implementation strategy is to rewrite the AST, augmenting call expressions with
pre-call and post-call shims to capture the arguments and return value,
respectively.
I can think of only one fundamental conceptual obstacle to this approach: R
functions are not necessarily referentially transparent. The arguments received
by a function are not values but promises. They can be evaluated directly
("standard evaluation"), after applying arbitrary syntactic transformations
("non-standard evaluation", aka NSE), or not at all. Therefore, if you peek at
the values of function arguments before evaluating the function, you risk
altering the semantics of the program, possibly fatally.
I'm looking for general advice about how to cope with NSE in this context. I
also have some specific questions:
1) Is it possible to determine whether a given function (primitive, in R, or
external) uses NSE on some or all of its arguments?
2) Is it possible to inspect the promise objects received by functions, say to
determine whether they have been evaluated, without actually evaluating them?
The R manual is not encouraging in this area:
https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-lang.html#Promise-objects
Thank you,
Evan
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