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

Cook, Malcolm MEC at stowers.org
Wed Oct 7 21:52:29 CEST 2015


What other packages do you have loaded?  Perhaps a BioConductor one that loads S4Vectors that announces upon load:

	Creating a generic function for 'nchar' from package 'base' in package 'S4Vectors'

Maybe a red herring...

~Malcolm

 > -----Original Message-----
 > From: R-devel [mailto:r-devel-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of Duncan
 > Murdoch
 > Sent: Monday, October 05, 2015 6:57 PM
 > To: Matt Dowle <mattjdowle at gmail.com>; r-devel at stat.math.ethz.ch
 > Subject: Re: [Rd] Error generated by .Internal(nchar) disappears when
 > debugging
 > 
 > 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
 > 
 > ______________________________________________
 > R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
 > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel



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