From Martin Maechler <maechler@stat.math.ethz.ch>  Tue Sep 15 08:44:15 1998
From: Martin Maechler <maechler@stat.math.ethz.ch> (Martin Maechler)
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 1998 09:44:15 +0200
Subject: seq  --> Dealing with bugs in R, etc.
In-Reply-To: <199809150724.JAA04164@alpha.luc.ac.be> (message from Jim Lindsey
 on Tue, 15 Sep 1998 09:24:20 +0200 (MET DST))
Message-ID: <199809150744.JAA07002@sophie.ethz.ch>

>>>>> "Jim" == Jim Lindsey <jlindsey@alpha.luc.ac.be> writes

   in a private mail to me

    Jim> That bug in seq() really has shaken my faith in R. How
    Jim> many other known bugs are there that we on r-help are not informed
    Jim> of and which can falsify our statistical analyses??? It is
    Jim> imperative that patches for such things be made immediately
    Jim> available on r-help. Jim

I think the answer to this should be known/discussed more widely:

Jim, you are right: 
The patch to seq(.) should have made it to  R-help.
[[actually in the mean time, the issue was raised that my patch
  was much more than was needed for dealing with rounding errors
  in the  seq(.,., by= ) case
]].

Note that there *are* other known bugs, all(?) of which being 
of much more low-level (and ``deeper'') nature.
Things like 
	mode(NULL)  -> "list"
		[now (in 0.63 "unstable") corrected to  "NULL"].

For bug submitting & tracking, 
Peter Dalgaard has recently setup a web place  
	[and 0.63-unstable has function  bug.report()]
were bug can be reported ``discussed'', etc. : 
	http://R-bugs.biostat.ku.dk/R

It is also available from CRAN's main page

---
There are also plans to regularly post a list of these bugs to R-devel (not
R-help!). 

If we know of a bug that affects high-level functions in bad way,
we usually *do* post to R-help....

R-devel is also for people who develop considerable amount of own R
functions.   There are things on R-devel which are not of interest to all
of the subscribers, but I think CRAN contributors like you should be part!

Martin

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seq --> Dealing with bugs in R, etc.
Martin Maechler