R devel - Oct 2023 - UseMethod forwarding of local variables

UseMethod has since the beginning had the 'feature' that local
variables in the generic are added to the environment in which the
method body is evaluated. This is documented in ?UseMethod and
R-lang.texi, but use of this 'feature' has been explicitly discouraged
in R-lang.texi for many years.

This is an unfortunate design decision for a number of reasons (see
below), so the plan is to remove this 'feature' in the next major
release.

Fortunately only a small number of packages on CRAN (see below) seem
to make use of this feature directly; a few more as reverse
dependencies.  The maintainers of the directly affected packages will
be notified separately.

Current R-devel allows you to set the environment variable
R_USEMETHOD_FORWARD_LOCALS=none to run R without this feature or
R_USEMETHOD_FORWARD_LOCALS=error to signal an error when a forwarded
variable's value is used.

Some more details:

An example:

     > foo <- function(x) { yyy <- 77; UseMethod("foo") }
     > foo.bar <- function(x) yyy
     > foo(structure(1, class = "bar"))
     [1] 77

Some reasons the design is a bad idea:

- You can't determine what a method does without knowing what the
   generic it will be called from looks like.

- Code analysis (codetools, the compiler) can't analyze method
   code reliably.

- You can't debug a method on its own. For the foo() example,

     > foo.bar(structure(1, class = "bar"))
     Error in foo.bar(structure(1, class = "bar")) : object
'yyy' not found

- A method relying on these variables won't work when reached via
NextMethod:

     > foo.baz <- function(x) NextMethod("foo")
     > foo(structure(2, class = c("baz", "bar")))
     Error in foo.bar(structure(2, class = c("baz", "bar")))
:
       object 'yyy' not found

The directly affected CRAN packages I have identified are:

- actuar
- quanteda
- optmatch
- rlang
- saeRobust
- Sim.DiffProc
- sugrrants
- texmex

Some of these fail with the environment set to 'error' but not to
'none', so they are getting a value from somewhere else that may or
may not be right.

Affected as revdeps of optmatch:

- cobalt
- htetree
- jointVIP
- MatchIt
- PCAmatchR
- rcbalance
- rcbsubset
- RItools
- stratamatch

Affected as revdeps of texmex:

- lax
- mobirep

Best,

luke

-- 
Luke Tierney
Ralph E. Wareham Professor of Mathematical Sciences
University of Iowa                  Phone:             319-335-3386
Department of Statistics and        Fax:               319-335-3017
    Actuarial Science
241 Schaeffer Hall                  email:   luke-tierney at uiowa.edu
Iowa City, IA 52242                 WWW:  http://www.stat.uiowa.edu