R devel - Mar 2005 - Quirk with as.function(..., envir = NULL) and body(..., envir = NULL) <-

I've been doing some looking through the environment code lately, and
noticed that both as.function(..., envir = NULL) and body(..., envir NULL)<-
treat the NULL as .GlobalEnv, even though NULL is the
environment of the base package.

The code that does this is very deep in the guts of R and affects all
sorts of things, so I'm not planning to change it for 2.1.0, but I
expect it will be fixed in 2.2.0 this fall.

In the meantime, I'd advise people to avoid using envir = NULL, and
instead use envir = globalenv() or envir = .GlobalEnv (which are
equivalent).  

If you want to set base as the environment for a function, you should
use

environment(f) <- NULL

for now. 

Duncan Murdoch