[R] get() versus getAnywhere()

Rolf Turner r.turner at auckland.ac.nz
Sun Apr 19 02:47:20 CEST 2009


On 17/04/2009, at 10:21 PM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:

> Benjamin Tyner wrote:
>> Many thanks Duncan. Perhaps this merits a more explicit note in the
>> documentation?
>>
>
> The quote I gave is from the documentation.  How could it be more  
> explicit?

This is unfortunately typical of the attitude of R-core people toward  
the
documentation.  ``It's clear.'' they say.  ``It's explicit.''  Clear and
explicit once you *know* what it's saying.  Not before, but.

In this case the documentation is quite opaque to me, and I would  
suspect
to a good many like me.  Now that you have made it *genuinely* explicit,
I can understand what the documentation is saying.  Prior to that I  
wouldn't
have had a prayer of guessing that get() would sometimes find things  
that
getAnywhere() would not find.

Moreover, if getAnywhere() does not really mean ``get *anywhere*''  
then its
name is misleading.  Surely it wouldn't be too tough to modify  
getAnywhere()
so that it really got anywhere.  E.g. get it to call get() when it can't
find an object with a given name?

	cheers,

		Rolf

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