[R] terminology for frames and environments

[Roger D. Peng]

Your understanding agrees with mine.  I always figured that the parent 
environment is determined by the lexical scope while the parent frame is 
determined by the function call stack.

-roger

Gabor Grothendieck wrote:

> 
> In ?exists it says:
> 
> inherits: should the enclosing frames of the environment be searched?
> 
> I believe what it is saying is that if inherits is TRUE and it fails
> to find the variable it will look in the parent environment and
> the parent of the parent, etc. (as opposed to looking in the calling
> frame next and the caller of the caller, etc.)
> 
> Now I thought that standard terminology in R was:
> 
> 1. enclosing environment or parent environment if one wanted to
> refer to the parent relative to the parent/child hierarchy 
> of environments
> 
> or
> 
> 2. calling frame or parent frame if one
> wanted to refer to a parent relative to the environments
> corresponding to the functions in the stack 
> of currently outstanding function calls
> 
> but here we seem to be referring to a parent frame as a #1. 
> 
> Could someone please clarify what standard terminology is?
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch 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
> 

-- 
Roger D. Peng
http://www.biostat.jhsph.edu/~rpeng/