[Rd] as.Date.character suggestion

[André Z. D. A.]

Your arguments seems like: "we can't fix bugs or improve anything because this would break backward compatibility". If the described behavior should be important on many common cases, create a new function. Or new release, deprecated uses for some functions.

Or maybe, add a new argument that allows the user to choose the old or new behavior. The default of this argument might be based on compilation flag or environment variable (this should be possible on all OSes).

But just discarding changes like this, doesn't evolve anything.


> On Wed, Aug 20, 2014 at 4:52 PM, Gabriel Becker <gmbecker at ucdavis.edu> wrote:
> 
>> Could do both to preserve bc...
>>
>> if(missing(format) || !nchar(format))
> 
> No, the problem is that the function behaves differently when format
> is missing than when it equals its default. Removing this difference
> necessarily changes behaviour and hence (at least in principle) breaks
> backward compatibility.
> 
> Peter
> 
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