R devel - Aug 2004 - attach behavior

In R 1.9.1, attaching an object more than once puts the object's name on 
the search path more than once also. Therefore, to remove it, one has to 
detach it multiply.
Wouldn'tn it make sense to change the behavior of attach in a way
that object names are not added to the search path more than once?

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Erich Neuwirth, Computer Supported Didactics Working Group
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On Sun, 29 Aug 2004, Erich Neuwirth wrote:
> In R 1.9.1, attaching an object more than once puts the object's name
on
> the search path more than once also. Therefore, to remove it, one has to
> detach it multiply.
> Wouldn'tn it make sense to change the behavior of attach in a way
> that object names are not added to the search path more than once?
They need not be the same object, so no.  It's quite common practice to
modify an object, attach it temporarily and detach it again.  I suspect
that people using attach() frequently should be thinking more in terms of
with().

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
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