From smyth at wehi.edu.au  Fri Oct 17 10:12:34 2003
From: smyth at wehi.edu.au (Gordon Smyth)
Date: Fri Oct 17 10:11:44 2003
Subject: [Rd] data() misbehaving inside a function
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At 05:50 PM 17/10/2003, A.J. Rossini wrote:
>Kurt Hornik <Kurt.Hornik@wu-wien.ac.at> writes:
>
>   <Martin wrote re dropping unquoted function args from packages/data>
>
> >> Definitely not worth the pain (I *know* I'd hear ... comments from
> >> them!)!
>
>I might be one of them.  You'll hear my screams for weeks...
>
> > Actually, I do think it is worth the pain.  The way I understand it, we
> > have a strategic decision to gradually eliminate non-standard eval.
>
>and for better or worse, I actually agree with Kurt.  Most languages
>don't let you do non-standard eval regularly, and in R/S, it is used
>"regularly".  I don't think that the added complexity is worth the
>convenience of saving 2 keystrokes.

For what it's worth, I'd add my voice to Kurt and Tony. Even though I've 
been an S user for 17 years, I still find it weird that

poisson(link=log)

works but

a <- "log"; poisson(link=a)

doesn't given that the help doc says

poisson(link="log")

Gordon

>best,
>-tony


[Rd] data() misbehaving inside a function
Gordon Smyth