IMO it’s technically challenging to implement (I’d spitball two really good R developers for a year to get it started) and the most compelling benefits are reasonably far in the future. Additionally, I don’t think there’s broad consensus about what a type system for R should even look like.
Hadley On Wednesday, November 26, 2025, ivo welch <[email protected]> wrote: > > I am more interested why something like this has not made its way into R > core as a first step to type checking *for everyone*. (I could imagine > that an option would turn on and off some automatic stopifnot like checking > given a standardized annotation form [type, dim].) > > is it because there is not much wider interest and desirability (so even a > basic working implementation would not be pulled into R by the powers that > are in charge), or is it because the work is too difficult and no one had > time to work on it? > > > On Wed, Nov 26, 2025 at 8:50 AM Hadley Wickham <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> You might be interested in Jim Hester’s old experiment that used ? - >> https://github.com/jimhester/types >> >> Hadley >> >> On Wednesday, September 17, 2025, IVO I WELCH <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> >>> Suggestion for Syntax Sugar: >>> >>> Would it make sense to permit a simple way to allow a coder to document >>> the function argument type? >>> >>> f <- function( a:chr, b:data.frame, c:logi ) { … } >>> >>> presumably, what comes behind the ‘:’ should match what ‘str’ returns. >>> >>> however, this need not be checked (except perhaps when a particular >>> option is set). catching errors as soon as possible makes code easier to >>> debug and error messages clearer. >>> >>> regards, >>> >>> /iaw >>> >>> ______________________________________________ >>> [email protected] mailing list >>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel >>> >> >> >> -- >> http://hadley.nz >> > -- http://hadley.nz [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
