[Rd] Error generated by .Internal(nchar) disappears when debugging

[Matt Dowle]

On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 4:57 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On 05/10/2015 7:24 PM, Matt Dowle wrote:
> > Joris Meys <jorismeys <at> gmail.com> writes:
> >
> >>
> >> Hi all,
> >>
> >> I have a puzzling problem related to nchar. In R 3.2.1, the internal
> > nchar
> >> gained an extra argument (see
> >> https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-announce/2015/000586.html)
> >>
> >> I've been testing code using the package copula, and at home I'm still
> >> running R 3.2.0 (I know, I know...). When trying the following code, I
> > got
> >> an error:
> >>
> >>> library(copula)
> >>> fgmCopula(0.8)
> >> Error in substr(sc[i], 2, nchar(sc[i]) - 1) :
> >>   4 arguments passed to .Internal(nchar) which requires 3
> >>
> >> Cheers
> >> Joris
> >
> >
> > I'm seeing a similar problem. IIUC, the Windows binary .zip from CRAN of
> > any package using base::nchar is affected. Could someone check my answer
> > here is correct please : http://stackoverflow.com/a/32959306/403310
>
> Nobody has posted a simple reproducible example here, so it's kind of
> hard to say.
>
> I would have guessed that a change to the internal signature of the C
> code underlying nchar() wouldn't have any effect on a package that
> called the R nchar() function.
>
> When I put together my own example (a tiny package containing a function
> calling nchar(), built to .zip using R 3.2.2, installed into R 3.2.0),
> it confirmed my guess.
>
> On the other hand, if some package is calling the .Internal function
> directly, I'd expect that to break.  Packages shouldn't do that.
>
> So I'd say there's been no evidence posted of a problem in R here,
> though there may be problems in some of the packages involved.  I'd
> welcome an example that provided some usable evidence.
>
> Duncan Murdoch
>
>
I don't have Windows so am not able to test unfortunately.
data.table makes no calls to .Internal(). Such calls are caught and
prevented by R CMD check.
Both data.table and copula contain "ByteCompile: yes" in their DESCRIPTION
files.  Does the toy package break with that setting?
Matt

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