From h.wickham at gmail.com  Tue Aug 23 04:58:12 2005
From: h.wickham at gmail.com (hadley wickham)
Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2005 21:58:12 -0500
Subject: [Rd] Functions with the same name: best practices
Message-ID: <f8e6ff05050822195854575b4d@mail.gmail.com>

Ok, here's another best practices question - let's say I'm writing a
package and I want to use a function name that is already claimed by a
function in the base R packages.  For the sake of argument, let's
pretend this function is for profiling the performance of a function
(like Rprof for example), and so an obvious name that comes to mind is
profile.  This, of course, clashes with the built in profile for
"investigating behavior of objective function near the solution
represented by fitted."

A little thinking and a quick survey of other packages reveal some
possible solutions:

 * capitalise the function differently (eg. Profile)
 * use a prefix/suffic (eg. Rprof)
 * use a thesaurus
 * use namespaces (and rely on others to use namespaces correctly in
their code/packages)

What would you suggest?

Thanks again,

Hadley



[Rd] Functions with the same name: best practices
hadley wickham