Let me expand a bit, I might have expressed myself poorly.
If there is a good reason for a warning I want a warning, and because I
take them seriously I don't want my console cluttered with those that can
be avoided. I strongly believe we should strive to make our code silent,
and I like my console to tell me only what I need to know. In my opinion
many warnings would be better designed as errors, sometimes with an
argument to opt in the behaviour, or a documented way to work around. Some
other warnings should just be documented behavior, because the behavior is
not all that surprising.
Some reasons why I find warnings hard to debug:
- options(warn = 1) is not always enough to spot the source of the warning
- options(warn = 2) fails at every warning, including the ones that are not
interesting to the user and that they may not do anything about, in these
cases you'll have to find a way to shut off the first to get to the second,
and if it's packaged code that's not fun.
- Unlike with errors, traceback() won't help.
- tryCatch() will help you only if you call it at the right place, assuming
you've found it.
- We might also have many harmless warnings triggered through loops and
hiding important ones.
- When you are sure that you are OK with your code despite the warning, say
`as.numeric(c("1", "2", "foo"))`, a workaround might be expensive (here we
could use regex first to ditch the non numeric strings but who does that)
so you're tempted to use `suppressWarnings()`, but then you might be
suppressing other important warnings so you just made your code less safe
because the developper wanted to make it safer (you might say it's on the
user but still, we get suboptimal code that was avoidable).
Of course I might miss some approaches that would make my experience of
debugging warnings more pleasant.
In our precise case I don't find the behavior surprising enough to warrant
more precious red ink since it's close to what we get with data.frame(),
and close to what we get with dplyr::mutate() FWIW, so I'd be personally
happier to have this documented and work silently.
Either way I appreciate you considering the problem.
Thanks,
Antoine
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