On 1 Jun 2004, Jari Oksanen wrote: > On Tue, 2004-06-01 at 12:21, Torsten Steuernagel wrote: > > On 28 May 2004 at 8:19, Duncan Murdoch wrote: > > > > > I'd advise against doing this kind of optimization. It will make your > > > code harder to maintain, and while it might be faster today, if "@<-" > > > is really a major time sink, it's an obvious candidate for > > > optimization in R, e.g. by making it .Internal or .Primitive. When > > > that happens, your "optimized" code will likely be slower (if it even > > > works at all). > > > > Agreed. I don't recommend doing this either. I don't believe it makes > > any difference using "slot<-" instead of "@<-" in real life. Anyway, that > > "optimized" code should always work (slower or not) because "slot<-" > > is fully documented and I don't see why it should be removed or its > > behaviour should change. That wouldn't only break the kind of code > > mentioned here but also everything else that makes use of "slot<-". > > > There are several other things that were fully documented and still were > removed. One of the latest cases was print.coefmat which was abruptly > made Defunct without warning or grace period: code written for 1.8* > didn't work in 1.9.0 and if corrected for 1.9.0 it wouldn't work in > pre-1.9.0. Anything can change in R without warning, and your code may > be broken anytime. Just be prepared.
And the tools to stay prepared are there too - if your packages are on CRAN, they get checked against patched and devel for free and the outcome listed; if not on CRAN, you can always check them on devel locally too. Watching the notes on developer.r-project.org helps - the print.coefmat change was highlighted for some time before 1.8.0 on: http://developer.r-project.org/180update.txt It is true, though, that writing current packages to be backwards-compatible to earlier R versions is extra overhead, and some users may not be able to change versions even if they'd like to. Using the appropriate methods is typically going to be more future-proof anyway (as a different thread noted recently in connection with namespaces). > > cheers, jari oksanen > -- Roger Bivand Economic Geography Section, Department of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, Breiviksveien 40, N-5045 Bergen, Norway. voice: +47 55 95 93 55; fax +47 55 95 93 93 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
