Dear list
I'm not sure whether this is a bug or an unavoidable consequence of the
way packages are loaded, but there can be surprising side effects of
calling a function via package::function. Here's an example using the
formula.tools package:
form <- a ~ b
as.character(form)
formula.tools::lhs(form)
as.character(form)
The first call to as.character returns:
[1] "~" "a" "b"
The second returns:
[1] "a ~ b"
The reason being that formula.tools has:
S3method(as.character,formula)
in its namespace, which quietly supersedes the default one. In my case
it led to a bug that was rather hard to track down because it looked
like non-deterministic behaviour.
Shouldn't there at least be a warning about such side effects, the way
library() tells you about masking?
Best
Simon Barthelme
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