I think it would be helpful if readBin checked that its endian argument is
a legal value.
Why? I was reviewing some of our code and noticed that the author had
readBin(..., endian="network") and never having heard of "network", I
looked at the man page for readBin, and it hadn't heard of "network"
either. Not good.
I then looked at the R code for readBin, which has this line:
swap <- endian != .Platform$endian
and swap is passed into the .Internal(readBin). Further use of Google
revealed that "network" is a known endian in the universe, and our code was
working by essentially a lucky chance that the data was "big" and our
current machines are "little". Really not good. I don't know enough about
endian stuff to know if it makes sense that "network" should be one of the
choices for endian for readBin (which from the documentation currently are:
"big", "little" or "swap"), but in my opinion R should have failed with the
choice of "network" in our code in the current version of R. I did
eventually find an aside in the R Data Import/Export document that
"network" is "big" so I will patch our code to be legal. Of course some
code may depend on this undocumented behavior, but I would guess that in
the vast majority of cases an illegal value really is a mistake.
Jen
> sessionInfo()
R version 3.6.1 (2019-07-05)
Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit)
Running under: Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS
Matrix products: default
BLAS: /home/mbr/r-project/R-3.6.1/lib/libRblas.so
LAPACK: /home/mbr/r-project/R-3.6.1/lib/libRlapack.so
locale:
[1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NUMERIC=C
[3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8 LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8
[5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8 LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
[7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NAME=C
[9] LC_ADDRESS=C LC_TELEPHONE=C
[11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C
attached base packages:
[1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base
loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] compiler_3.6.1
[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
______________________________________________
R-devel@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
