Hi, Short version of my question: Rf_applyClosure was marked attribute_hidden in Oct 2023, and I am curious why and if there is an alternative interface to it planned.
Long version: I have been toying with building a package that makes it easier to do non-standard evaluation directly using promises, rather than wrapping these in a custom type (like e.g. rlang does). The advantage of this approach is that it should be fully compatible with functions that use the standard R functions for NSE and inspecting function context, like substitute(), match.call(), or parent.frame(). And indeed, it works! -- in R 4.3, that is. The prototype version of the package is here: https://github.com/mjskay/uneval (the relevant function to my question is probably do_invoke, in R/invoke.R). While testing on R-devel, I noticed that Rf_applyClosure(), which used to be exported, is now marked with attribute_hidden. I traced the change to this commit in Oct 2023: https://github.com/r-devel/r-svn/commit/57dbe8ad471c8a34314ee74362ad479db03c033a However, the commit message did not give me clarity on the reason for the change, and I have not been able to find mention of this change in R-devel, R-package-devel, or the R bug tracker. So, I am curious why this function is no longer exported and if there is an alternative function planned to take its place. Neither Rf_eval nor do.call can do what I need to fully support rlang-style NSE using base R. The problem is that I need to be able to manually set up the list of promises provided as arguments to the function. I fully understand that the answer to my question might be "don't do that" ;). But I will humbly suggest that it would be really nice to be able to do NSE that can capture expressions with heterogeneous environments and pass these to functions in a way that is compatible with existing R functions that do NSE. The basic tools to do it are there in R 4.3, I think... Thanks for the help! ---Matt -- Matthew Kay Associate Professor Computer Science & Communication Studies Northwestern University matthew....@u.northwestern.edu http://www.mjskay.com/ ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
