The survival package, like many others, has several helper functions that are
not declared
in the namespace, since their only use is to be called by other "main"
functions of the
package. This works well since the functions in the survival namespace can see
them ---
without ::: arguments --- and others don't.
Until a situation I ran into this week, for which I solicit comments or advice.
The
concordance function is a new addition, and it has one case where the same
underlying
helper function is called multiple times, with many arguments passed through
from the
parent. I thought that this would be a good use for the trick we use for
model.frame, so
I have code like this:
concordance.coxph <- function(fit, ..., newdata, group, ymin, ymax,
timewt=c("n", "S", "S/G", "n/G", "n/G2"),
influence=0, ranks=FALSE, timefix=TRUE) {
Call <- match.call()
.
.
.
cargs <- c("ymin", "ymax","influence", "ranks", "timewt", "timefix")
cfun <- Call[c(1, match(cargs, names(Call), nomatch=0))]
cfun[[1]] <- quote(cord.work)
cfun$reverse <- TRUE
rval <- eval(cfun, parent.frame())
This worked fine in my not-in-a-namespace test bed, but then fails when
packaged up for
real: the code can't find the helper function cord.work! The rule that
survival package
functions can "see" their undeclared helpers fails.
I got it working by changing parent.frame() to environment(concordance) in the
eval()
call. Since everything used by cord.work is explicitly passed in its argument
list this
does work.
Comments or suggestions? (I avoid having survival:: in the survival package
because it
messes up my particular test bed.)
Terry
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