As a follow-up to my previous, let me make a concrete suggestion:
Add this as one of the options
df-partial-match = allowed, warn, fail
Set the default to warn for the current R-dev, and migrate it to fail at a later
date of
your choosing.
I expect that this is very little more work for the development team, it
provides an
extended grace period to those running old code that would depend on parial
matching (I
sometimes have to recreate a 4-5 year old analysis.), it will let those who
strongly agree
migrate to "fail" immediately, and save you from the flames of those
who disagree.
Some things that look good at first are not: examples from the past are na.fail
as the
default for missing values (with no global option to override) and strings as
factors
(with no option to override, global or otherwise). There are other options
that settle
into their default and never change. "It's tough to make predictions,
especially about
the future"-- Yogi Berra.
On 03/21/2013 06:00 AM, r-devel-request@r-project.org
wrote:> As variables in a data frame are generally considered similar to variables
in, say, the global environment, it seems strange that foo$bar can give you the
content of foo$bartender.
>
> In R-devel (i.e.,*not* R-3.0.0 beta, but 3.1.0-to-be) partial matches now
gives a warning.
>
> Of course, it is inevitable that lazy programmers will have been using code
like
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