From luke@goose.stat.umn.edu  Fri Oct 13 16:42:44 2000
From: luke@goose.stat.umn.edu (Luke Tierney)
Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2000 10:42:44 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: [Rd] Cautionary tale about c (PR#695)
In-Reply-To: <200010131457.QAA18499@pubhealth.ku.dk> from "J.C.Rougier@durham.ac.uk" at "Oct 13, 2000 04:57:09 pm"
Message-ID: <200010131542.KAA25280@goose.stat.umn.edu>

J.C.Rougier@durham.ac.uk wrote:
> This situation arose in a computer practical this morning.  A
> student overwrote "c" with a function.  This messes up lots of
> things, but it is difficult to remove the function "c" from the
> global environment because it is used as a function in both "rm"
> and "remove".  [The solution was to reassign "c" as a number, and
> then remove it.]  Would it be reasonable in "rm" and "remove" to
> insist that the "c" function is got from the base?  The same
> might apply to ".Internal" and "as.character", which are also
> used.
> 

One thing we've been talking about a bit is adding some form of name
space management.  This would insure the the c referred to in rm would
be the c in base.

luke

-- 
Luke Tierney
University of Minnesota                      Phone:           612-625-7843
School of Statistics                         Fax:             612-624-8868
313 Ford Hall, 224 Church St. S.E.           email:      luke@stat.umn.edu
Minneapolis, MN 55455 USA                    WWW:  http://www.stat.umn.edu
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[Rd] Cautionary tale about c (PR#695)
Luke Tierney