From pgilbert902 at gmail.com  Sat Mar 31 15:57:06 2012
From: pgilbert902 at gmail.com (Paul Gilbert)
Date: Sat, 31 Mar 2012 09:57:06 -0400
Subject: [Rd] CRAN policies
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Message-ID: <4F770D32.6090608@gmail.com>

Mark

I would like to clarify two specific points.

On 12-03-31 04:41 AM, Mark.Bravington at csiro.au wrote:
 > ...
> Someone has subsequently decided that code should look a certain way, and has added a check that
> isn't in the language itself-- but they haven't thought of everything, and of course they never could.

There is a large overlap between people writing the checks and people 
writing the interpreter. Even though your code may have been working, if 
your understanding of the language definition is not consistent with 
that of the people writing the interpreter, there is no guarantee that 
it will continue to work, and in some cases the way in which it fails 
could be that it produces spurious results. I am inclined to think of 
code checks as an additional way to be sure my understanding of the R 
language is close to that of the people writing the interpreter.

> It depends on how Notes are being interpreted, which from this thread is no longer clear.
 > The R-core line used to be "Notes are just notes" but now we seem to 
have "significant Notes" and ...

My understanding, and I think that of a few other people, was incorrect, 
in that I thought some notes were intended always to remain as notes, 
and others were more serious in that they would eventually become 
warnings or errors. I think Uwe addressed this misunderstanding by 
saying that all notes are intended to become warnings or errors. In 
several cases the reason they are not yet warnings or errors is that the 
checks are not yet good enough, they produce too many false positives. 
So, this means that it is very important for us to look at the notes and 
to point out the reasons for the false positives, otherwise they may 
become warnings or errors without being recognised as such.

 > ...

Paul



[Rd] CRAN policies
Paul Gilbert