From murdoch at stats.uwo.ca  Wed Feb 11 00:34:26 2009
From: murdoch at stats.uwo.ca (Duncan Murdoch)
Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 18:34:26 -0500
Subject: [Rd] Variable/function namespaces WAS: Bug in subsetting data
 frame	(PR#13515)
In-Reply-To: <8b356f880902100907s7f21cd65vf57043f134273b20@mail.gmail.com>
References: <8b356f880902100907s7f21cd65vf57043f134273b20@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <49920F02.3050603@stats.uwo.ca>

On 10/02/2009 12:07 PM, Stavros Macrakis wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 10:11 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
>> Stavros Macrakis wrote:
>>> On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 8:31 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca>wrote:
>>>> The evaluator recognizes the context of usage and will get the
>>>> function for a function call....
>>> Can you point me to chapter and verse in the language definition...
>> No, I'm also unable to find it.
> 
> ! This seems like a pretty fundamental thing to leave undocumented....

In open source nothing is undocumented, but sometimes the documentation 
is a little hard to read.  I think you want to look at the 
https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/src/main/eval.c section of the manual.

More seriously, I agree, but I don't have time to fix the omission.  If 
you work out a logical (from your point of view) place to put this, and 
write a first draft in texinfo format, I'll put it in.

Duncan Murdoch

> 
>> ...I think originally there was no difference, and it caused the obvious trouble when people used variable names like t and c other short function names, so this was added.  I don't remember whether the different lookup rules showed up first in R or S.
> 
> There is an interesting discussion of these issues (in a Lisp context)
> in "Technical Issues of Separation in Function Cells and Value Cells"
> Lisp and Symbolic Computation 1:1:81 (6/1988) -- available at
> http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/Technical-Issues.html.  I don't
> think an R-style approach is discussed there, though.
> 
>                 -s
> 
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[Rd] Variable/function namespaces WAS: Bug in subsetting data frame (PR#13515)
Duncan Murdoch