On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 9:08 PM, Hadley Wickham <h.wick...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Finally, now that the use of a NAMESPACE became mandatory (well, this > > happened a few years ago), advocating systematic use of foo::whatever() > > without explicitly importing the function sounds a little bit like an > > heroic act of resistance ;-) > > I don't think that's at all true - for most other programming > languages, the preferred style is to explicitly refer to functions, > including their namespace/package etc. > I think with R the issue of having functions with the same name (but different semantics) imported from different packages does not come up too often. IMHO the reason for this is (partly) historical. In the past there were no namespaces, at least they were not mandatory, and packages were loaded and attached as a whole, so people were defensive and used very specific function names to avoid name clashes. I chose graph.density() over density() and chose graph.adjlist() over adjlist(), etc. Last week I am chose diff() over git_diff(), and I guess I am not the only one with this tendency. It is just a matter of time to have a bunch of packages with a diff() function, and then it will matter where diff() is coming from. Gabor > > Hadley > > -- > http://had.co.nz/ > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
