[R] I don't understand this

[Luke Tierney]

On Tue, 2 Sep 2003, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:

> For reasons which I'll spare you, I'm writing a program to analyse
> R source code.  This has led me to probe some of the darker corners
> of R syntax to find out what is supposed to happen.
> 
> Now, from reading the R documentation (and the New S book &c) I know
> perfectly well that
>     f(a, b, etc) <- x
> is supposed to turn into
>     a <- "f<-"(a, b, etc, value=x)
> 
> Except, what if f is not an identifier or string?
> What, for example, should _this_ do?
> 
> > x <- NULL
> > (if (TRUE) names else dim)(x) <- 27
> 
> I was expecting _either_ that I would be told that you can't
> set names(NULL) to 27, _or_ that I would be told the whole thing
> wasn't allowed.
> 
> In fact, it was allowed.
> 
> > x
> [1] 27
> 
> This result has me completely baffled.
> 
> Is this behaviour intentional?

No.  Using anything other than a symbol or string for the function in
a complex assignment is an error.  The internals assumed the function
would be a symbol (the parser deals with the string case) but did not
check for this; should be fixed shortly in R-devel.

Thanks for pointing this out.

luke

-- 
Luke Tierney
University of Iowa                  Phone:             319-335-3386
Department of Statistics and        Fax:               319-335-3017
   Actuarial Science
241 Schaeffer Hall                  email:      luke at stat.uiowa.edu
Iowa City, IA 52242                 WWW:  http://www.stat.uiowa.edu