On 12-12-10 8:46 PM, Worik R wrote:
On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 2:27 PM, Duncan Murdoch
<murdoch.dun...@gmail.com <mailto:murdoch.dun...@gmail.com>> wrote:
On 12-12-10 7:33 PM, Worik R wrote:
Let me restate my question.
Is there a straightforward way of ensuring I can use the
variable name
USDCHF?
You can use any legal variable name. The only risk is that you will
overwrite some other variable that you created. You can't overwrite
variables from packages. (You might mask them, but they are still
accessible using the :: notation. E.g. after you set
USDCHF <- NULL
Exactly. I got around this by assigning NULL to the variable names that
I would have deleted. Then instead of testing for existence I tested
for NULL.
I think you are very confused. What are you "getting around" by doing
this?
you can still access the one in timeSeries using
timeSeries::USDCHF
Christ. That is what I wanted to delete. I read the scoping section of
R-Lang (again) and nothing I could see prepared me for the shock of...
> library(timeSeries)
> nrow(USDCHF)
[1] 62496
> rm(USDCHF)
Warning message:
In rm(USDCHF) : object 'USDCHF' not found
> nrow(USDCHF)
[1] 62496
The message from rm was that USDCHF did not exist. But I can still
access its properties with nrow.
It doesn't exist in the location where you asked to do the remove, i.e.
in the global environment.
This is very broken. I would not have believed I would see that in the
21st century with a modern language. (Oh wait, there is Javascript and
PHP, so in comparison R is not that broken)
I don't know what you think you are seeing, but in this respect R is not
particularly broken.
I am not new to R, I have been (mis)using it for 5 years. I love
aspects of R, but this and a few other things (lack of debugging support
and ignoring the "principle of least surprise" are two biggies) are very
frustrating. Without debugging support or more help from the compiler
(like a "cannot rm EURCHF" message instead of a lie) R causes as many
problems as it solves.
You said "remove USDCHF from the global environment", and R said "object
'USDCHF' not found". How is that a lie? It was never there.
Duncan Murdoch
Sigh. Thanks for the help.
Worik
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