[Rd] Bounty on Error Checking

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 04/01/2013 9:51 AM, Matthew Dowle wrote:
> On 04.01.2013 14:03, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> > On 13-01-04 8:32 AM, Matthew Dowle wrote:
> >>
> >> On Fri, Jan 3, 2013, Bert Gunter wrote
> >>> Well...
> >>>
> >>> On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 10:00 AM, ivo welch <ivo.welch <at>
> >>> anderson.ucla.edu> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> Dear R developers---I just spent half a day debugging an R
> >>>> program,
> >>>> which had two bugs---I selected the wrongly named variable, which
> >>>> turns out to have been a scalar, which then happily multiplied as
> >>>> if
> >>>> it was a matrix; and another wrongly named variable from a data
> >>>> frame,
> >>>> that triggered no error when used as a[["name"]] or a$name .
> >>>> there
> >>>> should be an option to turn on that throws an error inside R when
> >>>> one
> >>>> does this.  I cannot imagine that there is much code that wants to
> >>>> reference non-existing columns in data frames.
> >>>
> >>> But I can -- and do it all the time: To add a new variable, "d" to
> >>> a
> >>> data frame, df,  containing only "a" and "b" (with 10 rows, say):
> >>>
> >>> df[["d"]] <- 1:10
> >>
> >> Yes but that's `[[<-`. Ivo was talking about `[[` and `$`; i.e.,
> >> select
> >> only not assign, if I understood correctly.
> >>
> >>>
> >>> Trying to outguess documentation to create error triggers is a very
> >>> bad idea.
> >>
> >> Why exactly is it a very bad idea? (I don't necessarily disagree,
> >> just
> >> asking
> >> for more colour.)
> >>
> >>> R already has plenty of debugging tools -- and there is even a
> >>> "debug"
> >>> package. Perhaps you need a better programming editor/IDE. There
> >>> are
> >>> several listed on CRAN, RStudio, etc.
> >>
> >> True, but that relies on you knowing there's a bug to hunt for. What
> >> if
> >> you
> >> don't know you're getting incorrect results, silently? In a similar
> >> way
> >> that options(warn=2) turns known warnings into errors, to enable you
> >> to
> >> be
> >> more strict if you wish,
> >
> > I would say the point of options(warn=2) is rather to let you find
> > the location of the warning more easily, because it will abort the
> > evaluation.
>
> True but as well as that, I sometimes like to run production systems
> with
> options(warn=2). I'd prefer some tasks to halt at the slightest hint of
> trouble than write a warning silently to a log file that may not be
> looked
> at. I think of that as being more strict, more robust. Since
> option(warn=2)
> is set even when there is no warning, to catch if one arises in future.
> Not
> just to find it more easily once you know there is a warning.
>
> > I would not recommend using code that issues warnings.
>
> Not sure what you mean here.

I just meant that I consider warnings to be a problem (as you do), so 
they should all be fixed.

>
> >
> > an option to turn on warnings from `[[` and
> >> `$`
> >> if the column is missing (select only, not assign) doesn't seem like
> >> a
> >> bad option to have. Maybe it would reveal some previously silent
> >> bugs.
> >
> > I agree that this would sometimes be useful, but a very common
> > convention is to do something like
> >
> > if (is.null(obj$element)) {  do something }
> >
> > These would all have to be re-written to something like
> >
> > if (missing.field(obj, "element") { do something }
> >
> > There are several hundred examples of the first usage in base R; I
> > imagine thousands more in contributed packages.
>
> Yes but Ivo doesn't seem to be writing that if() in his code. We're
> only talking about an option that users can turn on for their own
> code, iiuc. Not anything that would affect or break thousands of
> packages. That's why I referred to the fact that all packages now
> have namespaces, in the earlier post.
>
> > I don't think the
> > benefit of the change is worth all the work that would be necessary
> > to
> > implement it.
>
> It doesn't seem to be a lot of work. I already posted a working
> straw man, for example, as a first step.

I understood the proposal to be that evaluating "obj$element" would 
issue a warning if element didn't exist.  If that were the case, then 
the common test

is.null(obj$element)

would issue a warning in the cases where it now returns TRUE.

Duncan Murdoch