>>Wasteful of disk space, but disk space is cheap. It's less wasteful of >>your time, if the referenced code breaks in an unexpected time. Your >>time is much more valuable than disk space. > > On the other hand, it's quite dangerous software design. What if the > original author finds a bug and implements a fix, but you don't hear about > it? > > Furthermore, what happens when I come along and need the same functionality? > Sure I could make a copy, but maybe I only know about your copy and don't > know it is a copy of something else, so now we have a copy of a copy, which > is even more problematic. Using ::: prevents this issue.
There are costs and benefits to both approaches. Copy-and-paste also minimises external dependencies which can be important in some cases. I'm not arguing for unmitigated duplication, but there are definitely good reasons to do it. I have quite a few v. simple functions that live in multiple packages. Often I want to keep the dependencies of packages as lightweight as possible (learning from past experiences) and avoid tightly coupling packages together. Hadley -- Chief Scientist, RStudio http://had.co.nz/ ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel