R help - Apr 2010 - R2.11.0 - rasterImage() and barplot fill-patterns

Hello Peter,
Thank you, and the R core team, for the new release.


I see that in R 2.11.0 there is now support for rendering of raster (bitmap)
images through rasterImage().

I am wondering - can this be used to create a texture/fill-pattern for
hist()/barplot()  ?
(A request made several times throughout the years on the mailing list.
For example:
http://osdir.com/ml/lang.r.general/2005-07/msg00799.html
)

(I am also sending this e-mail to the maintainers of lattice, ggplot2 and
gplots in the hope for more perspectives)

With much respect,
Tal








----------------Contact
Details:-------------------------------------------------------
Contact me: Tal.Galili@gmail.com |  972-52-7275845
Read me: www.talgalili.com (Hebrew) | www.biostatistics.co.il (Hebrew) |
www.r-statistics.com (English)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------




On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 12:01 PM, Peter Dalgaard <pd.mes@cbs.dk> wrote:
> I've rolled up R-2.11.0.tar.gz a short while ago. This is a development
> release which contains a number of new features.
>
> Also, a number of mostly minor bugs have been fixed. See the full list
> of changes below.
>
> NOTE: The build platform has been changed for this release. Please watch
> out extra carefully for anomalies.
>
> You can get it from
>
> http://cran.r-project.org/src/base/R-2/R-2.11.0.tar.gz
>
> or wait for it to be mirrored at a CRAN site nearer to you.
>
> Binaries for various platforms will appear in due course.
>
>       For the R Core Team
>
>       Peter Dalgaard
>
> These are the md5sums for the freshly created files, in case you wish
> to check that they are uncorrupted:
>
> MD5 (AUTHORS) = ac9746b4845ae866661f51cfc99262f5
> MD5 (COPYING) = eb723b61539feef013de476e68b5c50a
> MD5 (COPYING.LIB) = a6f89e2100d9b6cdffcea4f398e37343
> MD5 (FAQ) = 5b653442bedab476a4eff7468192fb5f
> MD5 (INSTALL) = 70447ae7f2c35233d3065b004aa4f331
> MD5 (NEWS) = 59017734fb8474f98f994c7a5a27f9fb
> MD5 (ONEWS) = a8c985af5ad5e9c7e0a9f502d07baeb4
> MD5 (OONEWS) = 4f004de59e24a52d0f500063b4603bcb
> MD5 (R-latest.tar.gz) = c6c1e866299f533617750889c729bfb3
> MD5 (README) = 433182754c05c2cf7a04ad0da474a1d0
> MD5 (RESOURCES) = 020479f381d5f9038dcb18708997f5da
> MD5 (THANKS) = f2ccf22f3e20ebaa86f8ee5cc6b0f655
> MD5 (R-2/R-2.11.0.tar.gz) = c6c1e866299f533617750889c729bfb3
>
> This is the relevant part of the NEWS file:
>
>                CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.11.0
>
>
> SIGNIFICANT USER-VISIBLE CHANGES
>
>    o   Packages must have been installed under R >= 2.10.0, as the
>        current help system is the only one now supported.
>
>    o   A port to 64-bit Windows is now available as well as binary
>        package repositiories: see the 'R Administration and
>        Installation Manual'.
>
>    o   Argument matching for primitive functions is now done in the
>        same way as for interpreted functions except for the deliberate
>        exceptions
>
>            call switch .C .Fortran .Call .External
>
>        all of which use positional matching for their first argument,
>        and also some internal-use-only primitives.
>
>    o   The default device for command-line R at the console on Mac OS X
>        is now quartz() and not X11().
>
>
> NEW FEATURES
>
>    o   The 'open' modes for connections are now interpreted more
>        consistently.  open = "r" is now equivalent to open =
"rt" for
>        all connections.  The default open = "" now means
"rt" for all
>        connections except the compressed file connections gzfile(),
>        bzfile() and xzfile() for which it means "rb".
>
>    o   R CMD INSTALL now uses the internal untar() in package utils:
>        this ensures that all platforms can install bzip2- and
>        xz-compressed tarballs.  In case this causes problems (as it
>        has on some Windows file systems when run from Cygwin tools)
>        it can be overridden by the environment variable
>        R_INSTALL_TAR: setting this to a modern external tar program
>        will speed up unpacking of large (tens of Mb or more)
>        tarballs.
>
>    o   help(try.all.packages = TRUE) is much faster (although the
>        time taken by the OS to find all the packages the first time
>        it is used can dominate the time).
>
>    o   R CMD check has a new option '--timings' to record
>        per-example timings in file
<pkg>.Rcheck/<pkg>-Ex.timings.
>
>    o   The TRE library has been updated to version 0.8.0 (minor bugfixes).
>
>    o   grep[l], [g]sub and [g]regexpr now work in bytes in an 8-bit
>        locales if there is no marked UTF-8 input string: this will be
>        somewhat faster, and for [g]sub() give the result in the
>        native encoding rather than in UTF-8 (which returns to the
>        behaviour prior to R 2.10.0).
>
>    o   A new argument 'skipCalls' has been added to browser() so
that
>        it can report the original context when called by other
>        debugging functions.
>
>    o   More validity checking of UTF-8 and MBCS strings is done by
>        agrep() and the regular-expression matching functions.
>
>    o   The undocumented restriction on gregexpr() to length(text) > 0
>        has been removed.
>
>    o   Package tcltk now sends strings to Tcl in UTF-8: this means
>        that strings with a marked UTF-8 encoding are supported in
>        non-UTF-8 locales.
>
>    o   The graphics engine now supports rendering of raster (bitmap)
>        images, though not all graphics devices can provide (full)
>        support.  Packages providing graphics devices (e.g., Cairo,
>        RSvgDevice, cairoDevice) will need to be reinstalled.
>
>        There is also support in the graphics engine for capturing
>        raster images from graphics devices (again not supported
>        on all graphics devices).
>
>    o   R CMD check now also checks if the package and namespace can
>        be unloaded: this provides a check of the .Last.lib() and
>        .onUnload() hook functions (unless --install=fake).
>
>    o   prop.table(x) now accepts a one-dimensional table for x.
>
>    o   A new function vapply() has been added, based on a suggestion
>        from Bill Dunlap.  It requires that a template for the
>        function value be specified, and uses it to determine the
>        output type and to check for consistency in the function
>        values.
>
>    o   The main HTML help page now links to a reformatted copy of
>        this NEWS file. (Suggested by Henrik Bengtsson.)  Package
>        index files link to the package DESCRIPTION and NEWS files and
>        a list of demos when using dynamic help.
>
>    o   The [ method for class "AsIs" allows the next method to
change
>        the underlying class.  (Wish of Jens Oehlschlägel.)
>
>    o   write.csv[2] no longer allow 'append' to be changed: as
ever,
>        direct calls to write.table() give more flexibility as well as
>        more room for error.
>
>    o   The index page for HTML help for a package now collapses
>        multiple signatures for S4 methods into a single entry.
>
>    o   The use of '.required' by require() and detach() has been
>        replaced by '.Depends' which is set from the
'Depends' field
>        of a package (even in packages with name spaces).  By default
>        detach() prevents such dependencies from being detached: this
>        can be overridden by the argument 'force'.
>
>    o   bquote() has been extended to work on function definitions
>        (wish of PR#14031).
>
>    o   detach() when applied to an object other than a package
>        returns the environment that has been detached, to parallel
>        attach().
>
>    o   readline() in non-interactive use returns "" and does not
>        attempt to read from the 'terminal'.
>
>    o   New function file_ext() in package 'tools'.
>
>    o   xtfrm() is now primitive and internally generic, as this allows
>        S4 methods to be set on it without name-space scoping issues.
>
>        There are now "AsIs" and "difftime" methods, and
the default
>        method uses unclass(x) if is.numeric(x) is true (which will be
>        faster but relies on is.numeric() having been set correctly
>        for the class).
>
>    o   is.numeric(x) is now false for a "difftime" object
>        (multiplication and division make no sense for such objects).
>
>    o   The default method of weighted.mean(x, w) coerces 'w' to be
>        numeric (aka double); previously only integer weights were
>        coerced.  Zero weights are handled specially so an infinite
>        value with zero weight does not force an NaN result.
>
>        There is now a "difftime" method.
>
>    o   bug.report() now has 'package' and 'lib.loc'
arguments to
>        generate bug reports about packages.  When this is used, it
>        looks for a BugReports field in the package DESCRIPTION file,
>        which will be assumed to be a URL at which to submit the
>        report, and otherwise generates an email to the package
>        maintainer.  (Suggested by Barry Rowlingson.)
>
>    o   quantile() now has a method for the date-time class
"POSIXt",
>        and types 1 and 3 (which never interpolate) work for Dates and
>        ordered factors.
>
>    o   length(<POSIXlt>)  now returns the length of the corresponding
>        abstract timedate-vector rather than always 9 (the length of the
>        underlying list structure).  (Wish of PR#14073 and PR#10507.)
>
>    o   The readline completion backend no longer sorts possible
>        completions alphabetically (e.g., function argument names) if
>        R was built with readline >= 6.
>
>    o   select.list() gains a 'graphics' argument to allow
Windows/Mac
>        users to choose the text interface.  This changes the
>        behaviour of new.packages(ask=TRUE) to be like
>        update.packages(ask=TRUE) on those platforms in using a text
>        menu: use ask="graphics" for a graphical menu.
>
>    o   New function chooseBioCmirror() to set the "BioC_mirror"
option.
>
>    o   The R grammar prevents using the argument 'name' in
signatures
>        of S4 methods for '$' and '$<-', since they will
always be
>        called with a character string value for 'name'.  The
implicit
>        S4 generic functions have been changed to reflect this:
>        packages which included 'name' in the signature of their
>        methods need to be updated and re-installed.
>
>    o   The handling of the 'method' argument of glm() has been
>        refined following suggestions by Ioannis Kosmidis and Heather
>        Turner.
>
>    o   str() gains a new argument 'list.len' with default 99,
limiting the
>        number of list() items (per level), thanks to suggestions from
>        David Winsenius.
>
>    o   Having formal arguments of an S4 method in a different order
>        from the generic is now an error (the warning having been
>        ignored by some package maintainers for a long time).
>
>    o   New functions enc2native() and enc2utf8() convert character
>        vectors with possibly marked encodings to the current locale and
>        UTF-8 respectively.
>
>    o   Unrecognized escapes and embedded nuls in character strings are
>        now an error, not just a warning.  Thus option
"warnEscapes"
>        is no longer needed.  rawToChar() now removes trailing nuls
>        silently, but other embedded nuls become errors.
>
>    o   Informational messages about masked objects displayed when a
>        package is attached are now more compact, using strwrap()
>        instead of one object per line.
>
>    o   print.rle() gains argument 'prefix'.
>
>    o   download.file() gains a "curl" method, mainly for use on
>        platforms which have 'curl' but not 'wget', but also
for some
>        hard-to-access URLs.
>
>    o   In Rd, \eqn and \deqn will render in HTML (and convert to text)
>        upper- and lower-case Greek letters (entered as \alpha ...),
>        \ldots, \dots, \ge and \le.
>
>    o   utf8ToInt() and intToUtf8() now map NA inputs to NA outputs.
>
>    o   file() has a new argument 'raw' which may help if it is used
>        with something other than a regular file, e.g. a character device.
>
>    o   New function strtoi(), a wrapper for the C function strtol.
>
>    o   as.octmode() and as.hexmode() now allow inputs of length other
>        than one.
>
>        The format() and print() methods for "octmode" now
preserve
>        names and dimensions (as those for "hexmode" did).
>
>        The format() methods for classes "octmode" and
"hexmode" gain
>        a 'width' argument.
>
>    o   seq.int() returns an integer result in some further cases
>        where seq() does, e.g. seq.int(1L, 9L, by = 2L).
>
>    o   Added \subsection{}{} macro to Rd syntax, for subsections
>        within sections.
>
>    o   n-dimensional arrays with dimension names can now be indexed
>        by an n-column character matrix. The indices are matched
>        against the dimension names.  NA indices are propagated to the
>        result.  Unmatched values and "" are not allowed and
result in
>        an error.
>
>    o   interaction(drop=TRUE) uses less memory (related to PR#14121).
>
>    o   summary() methods have been added to the "srcref" and
>        "srcfile" classes, and various encoding issues have been
>        cleaned up.
>
>    o   If option "checkPackageLicense" is set to TRUE (not
currently
>        the default), users will be asked to agree to
>        non-known-to-be-FOSS package licences at first use.
>
>    o   Checking setAs(a,b) methods only gives a message instead of a
>        warning, when one of a or b is unknown.
>
>    o   New function norm() to compute a matrix norm.
>        norm() and also backsolve() and sample() have implicit S4 generics.
>
>    o   Renviron.site and Rprofile.site can have architecture-specific
>        versions on systems with sub-architectures.
>
>    o   R CMD check now (by default) also checks Rd files for
>        auto-generated content in need of editing, and missing argument
>        descriptions.
>
>    o   aggregate() gains a formula method thanks to a contribution by
>        Arni Magnusson.  The data frame method now allows summary
>        functions to return arbitrarily many values.
>
>    o   path.expand() now propagates NA values rather than converting them
>        to "NA".
>
>    o   file.show() now disallows NA values for file names, headers, and
>        pager.
>
>    o   The 'fuzz' used by seq() and seq.int() has been reduced from
>        1e-7 to 1e-10, which should be ample for the double-precision
>        calculations used in R.  It ensures that the fuzz never comes
>        into play with sequences of integers (wish of PR#14169).
>
>    o   The default value of RSiteSearch(restrict=) has been changed
>        to include vignettes but to exclude R-help.  The R-help
>        archives available have been split, with a new option of
>        "Rhelp10" for those from 2010.
>
>    o   New function rasterImage() in the 'graphics' package for
drawing
>        raster images.
>
>    o   stats:::extractAIC.coxph() now omits aliased terms when computing
>        the degrees of freedom (suggestion of Terry Therneau).
>
>    o   cor() and cov() now test for misuse with non-numeric
>        arguments, such as the non-bug report PR#14207.
>
>    o   pchisq(ncp =, log.p = TRUE) is more accurate for probabilities
>        near one.  E.g. pchisq(80, 4, ncp=1, log.p=TRUE).  (Maybe what
>        was meant in PR#14126.)
>
>    o   maintainer() has been added, to give convenient access to the
>        name of the maintainer of a package (contributed by David
>        Scott).
>
>    o   sample() and sample.int() allow zero items to be sampled from
>        a zero-length input.  sample.int() gains a default value
>        'size=n' to be more similar to sample().
>
>    o   switch() returned NULL on error (not previously documented on
>        the help page): it now does so invisibly, analogously to
>        if-without-else.
>
>        It is now primitive: this means that EXPR is always matched to
>        the first argument and there is no danger of partial matching
>        to later named arguments.
>
>    o   Primitive functions UseMethod(), attr(), attr<-(), on.exit(),
>        retracemem() and substitute() now use standard argument
>        matching (rather than positional matching).  This means that
>        all multi-argument primitives which are not internal now use
>        standard argument matching except where positional matching is
>        desirable (as for switch(), call(), .C() ...).
>
>    o   All the one-argument primitives now check that any name
>        supplied for their first argument is a partial match to the
>        argument name as documented on the help page: this also
>        applies to replacement functions of two arguments.
>
>    o   base::which() uses a new .Internal function when arr.ind is
>        FALSE resulting in a 10x speedup.  Thanks to Patrick Aboyoun
>        for implementation suggestions.
>
>    o   Help conversion to text now uses the first part of \enc{}{}
>        markup if it is representable in the current output encoding.
>        On the other hand, conversion to LaTeX with the default
>        outputEncoding = "ASCII" uses the second part.
>
>    o   A new class "listOfMethods" has been introduced to
represent
>        the methods in a methods table, to replace the deprecated
>        class "MethodsList".
>
>    o   any() and all() return early if possible.  This may speed up
>        operations on long vectors.
>
>    o   strptime() now accepts "%z" (for the offset from UTC in
the
>        RFC822 format of +/-hhmm).
>
>    o   The PCRE library has been updated to version 8.02, a bug-fix
>        release which also updates tables to Unicode 5.02.
>
>    o   Functions which may use a graphical select.list() (including
>        menu() and install.packages()) now check on a Unix-alike that
>        Tk can be started (and not just
>        capabilities("tcltk") &&
capabilities("X11")).
>
>    o   The parser no longer marks strings containing octal or hex
>        escapes as being in UTF-8 when entered in a UTF-8 locale.
>
>    o   On platforms with cairo but not Pango (notably Mac OS X) the
>        initial default X11() type is set to "Xlib": this avoids
>        several problems with font selection when done by cairo rather
>        than Pango (at least on Mac OS X).
>
>    o   New arrayInd() such that which(x, arr.ind = TRUE) for an array
>        'x' is now equivalent to arrayInd(which(x), dim(x),
dimnames(x)).
>
>
> DEPRECATED & DEFUNCT
>
>    o   Bundles of packages are defunct.
>
>    o   stats::clearNames() is defunct: use unname().
>
>    o   Basic regular expressions are defunct, and strsplit(), grep(),
>        grepl(), sub(), gsub(), regexpr() and gregexpr() no longer
>        have an 'extended' argument.
>
>    o   methods::trySilent() is defunct.
>
>    o   index.search() (which was deprecated in 2.10.0) is no longer
>        exported and has a different argument list.
>
>    o   Use of multiple arguments to return() is now defunct.
>
>    o   The use of UseMethod() with more than two arguments is now defunct.
>
>    o   In the 'methods' package, the MethodsList metadata objects
which
>        had been superseded by hash tables (environments) since R
>        2.8.0 are being phased out.  Objects of this class are no
>        longer assigned or used as metadata by the package.
>
>        getMethods() is now deprecated, with its internal use replaced
>        by findMethods() and other changes.  Creating objects from the
>        MethodsList class is also deprecated.
>
>    o   Parsing strings containing both octal/hex and Unicode escapes
>        now gives a warning and will become an error in R 2.12.0.
>
>
> INSTALLATION
>
>    o   UTF-8 is now used for the reference manual and package
>        manuals.  This requires LaTeX '2005/12/01' or later.
>
>    o   configure looks for a POSIX compliant tr, Solaris's
>        /usr/ucb/tr having been found to cause Rdiff to malfunction.
>
>    o   configure is now generated with autoconf-2.65, which works
>        better on recent systems and on Mac OS X.
>
>
> PACKAGE INSTALLATION
>
>    o   Characters in R source which are not translatable to the
>        current locale are now handled more tolerantly:  these will be
>        converted to hex codes with a warning.  Such characters are
>        only really portable if they appear in comments.
>
>    o   R CMD INSTALL now tests that the installed package can be loaded
>        (and backs out the installation if it cannot): this can be
>        suppressed by --no-test-load.  This avoids installing/updating
>        a package that cannot be used: common causes of failures to
>        load are missing/incompatible external software and
>        missing/broken dependent packages.
>
>    o   Package installation on Windows for a package with a src
>        directory now checks if a DLL is created unless there is a
>        src/Makefile.win file: this helps catch broken installations
>        where the toolchain has not reported problems in building the DLL.
>        (Note: this can be any DLL, not just one named
<pkg-name>.dll.)
>
>
> BUG FIXES
>
>    o   Using with(), eval() etc with a list with some unnamed
>        elements now works. (PR#14035)
>
>    o   The "quick" dispatch of S4 methods for primitive functions
was
>        not happening, forcing a search each time.  (Dispatch for
>        closures was not affected.)  A side effect is that default
>        values for arguments in a method that do not have defaults in
>        the generic will now be ignored.
>
>    o   Trying to dispatch S4 methods for primitives during the search
>        for inherited methods slows that search down and potentially
>        could cause an infinite recursion.  An internal switch was
>        added to turn off all such methods from
>        findInheritedMethods().
>
>    o   R framework installation (on Mac OS X) would not work properly
>        if a rogue Resources directory was present at the top level.
>        Such a non-symlink will now be renamed to Resources.old (and
>        anything previously named Resources.old removed) as part of
>        the framework installation process.
>
>    o   The checks for conforming S4 method arguments could fail when
>        the signature of the generic function omitted some of the
>        formal arguments (in addition to ...).  Arguments omitted from
>        the method definition but conforming (per the documentation)
>        should now be ignored (treated as "ANY") in dispatching.
>
>    o   The computations for S4 method evaluation when '...' was in
the
>        signature could fail, treating '...' as an ordinary symbol.
>        This has been fixed, for the known cases.
>
>    o   Various ar() fitting methods have more protection for singular
>        fits.
>
>    o   callNextMethod now works again with the drop= argument in `[`
>
>    o   parse() and parse_Rd() miscounted columns when multibyte UTF-8
>        characters were present.
>
>    o   Formatting of help pages has had minor improvements: extra
>        blank lines have been removed from the text format, and empty
>        package labels removed from HTML.
>
>    o   cor(A, B) where A has n x 1 and B a 1-dimensional array
>        segfaulted or gave an internal error.
>        (The case cor(B, A) was PR#7116.)
>
>    o   cut.POSIXt() applied to a start value after the DST transition
>        on a DST-change day could give the wrong time for 'breaks'
in units
>        of days or longer.  (PR#14208)
>
>    o   do_par() UNPROTECTed too early (PR#14214)
>
>    o   subassignment x[[....]] <- y didn't check for a zero-length
>        right hand side, and inserted rubbish value. (PR#14217)
>
>    o   fisher.test() no longer gives a P-value *very* slightly > 1,
>        in some borderline cases.
>
>    o   Internal function matchArgs no longer modifies the general
>        purpose bits of the SEXPs that make up the formals list of R
>        functions.  This fixes an invalid error message that would
>        occur when a garbage collection triggered a second call to
>        matchArgs for the same function via a finalizer.
>
>    o   gsub() in 2.10.x could fail from stack overflow for extremely
>        long strings due to temporary data being allocated on the
>        stack.  Also, gsub() with fixed=TRUE is in some circumstances
>        considerably faster.
>
>    o   Several primitives, including attributes(), attr<-()
>        interactive(), nargs() and proc.time(), did not check that
>        they were called with the correct number of arguments.
>
>    o   A potential race condition in list.files() when other processes
>        are operating on the directory has been fixed; the code now
>        dynamically allocates memory for file listings in a single
>        pass instead of making an initial count pass.
>
>    o   mean(x, trim=, na.rm = FALSE) failed to return NA if 'x'
>        contained missing values.  (Reported by Bill Dunlap.)
>
>    o   Extreme tail behavior of, pbeta() {and hence pf()}, e.g.,
>        pbeta(x, 3, 2200, lower.tail=FALSE, log.p=TRUE) now returns
>        finite values instead of jumping to -Inf too early (PR#14230).
>
>    o   parse(text=x) misbehaved for objects 'x' that were not
coerced
>        internally to character, notably symbols.  (Reported to
>        R-devel by Bill Dunlap.)
>
>    o   The internal C function 'coerceSymbol' now handles coercion
to
>        character, and warns if coercion fails (rather than silently
>        returning NULL).  This allows a name to be given where a
>        character vector is required in functions which coerce
>        internally.
>
>    o   The interpretation by strptime() of %c was non-standard (not
>        that it is ever advisable to use locale- and system-specific
>        input formats).
>
>    o   capabilities("X11") now works the same way on Mac OS X as
on
>        other platforms (and as documented: it was always true for R
>        built with --with-aqua, as the CRAN builds are).
>
>    o   The X11() device with cairo but not Pango (notably Mac OS X)
>        now checks validity of text strings in UTF-8 locales (since
>        Pango does but cairo it seems does not).
>
>    o   read.fwf() misread multi-line records when n was specified.
>        (PR#14241)
>
>    o   all.equal(*, tolerance = e) passes the numeric tolerance also to
>        the comparison of the attributes.
>
>    o   pgamma(0,0), a boundary case, now returns 0, its limit from the
>        left, rather than the limit from the right.
>
>    o   Issuing POST requests to the internal web server could stall
>        the request under certain circumstances.
>
>    o   gzcon( <textConnection> ), an error, no longer damages the
>        connection (in a way to have it seg.fault). (PR#14237)
>
>    o   All the results from hist() now use the nominal 'breaks' not
>        those adjusted by the numeric 'fuzz": in recent versions
the
>        nominal 'breaks' were reported but the 'density'
referred to
>        the intervals used in the calculation -- which mattered very
>        slightly for one of the extreme bins.  (Based on a report by
>        Martin Becker.)
>
>    o   If xy[z].coords (used internally by many graphics functions) are
>        given a list as 'x', they now check that the list has
suitable
>        names and give a more informative error message.  (PR#13936)
>
>
>
>
> --
> Peter Dalgaard
> Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
> Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
> Phone: (+45)38153501
> Email: pd.mes@cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd@gmail.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> R-announce@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-announce
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help@r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide
> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>
	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

Hi,

This idea was also discussed when Paul Murrell first announced the
grid.raster function to R-devel,
http://tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au/R/e8/devel/09/12/0912.html

My personal conclusion was that vector fill patterns are generally
better in terms of resolution and speed. Of course the situation might
be different if one wanted to use a fancy image pattern, or if there
was a fast implementation of tiling patterns at the C level.

I wrote a proof-of-concept here --- my main issue is that the
resulting grob is not vectorized,

http://gridextra.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/inst/comparisonPattern.r

Best,

baptiste


On 22 April 2010 14:10, Tal Galili <tal.galili at gmail.com>
wrote:
> Hello Peter,
> Thank you, and the R core team, for the new release.
>
>
> I see that in R 2.11.0 there is now support for rendering of raster
(bitmap)
> images through rasterImage().
>
> I am wondering - can this be used to create a texture/fill-pattern for
> hist()/barplot() ??
> (A request made several times throughout the years on the mailing list.
> For example:
> http://osdir.com/ml/lang.r.general/2005-07/msg00799.html
> )
>
> (I am also sending this e-mail to the maintainers of lattice, ggplot2 and
> gplots in the hope for more perspectives)
>
> With much respect,
> Tal
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ----------------Contact
> Details:-------------------------------------------------------
> Contact me: Tal.Galili at gmail.com | ?972-52-7275845
> Read me: www.talgalili.com (Hebrew) | www.biostatistics.co.il (Hebrew) |
> www.r-statistics.com (English)
>
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 12:01 PM, Peter Dalgaard <pd.mes at cbs.dk>
wrote:
>
>> I've rolled up R-2.11.0.tar.gz a short while ago. This is a
development
>> release which contains a number of new features.
>>
>> Also, a number of mostly minor bugs have been fixed. See the full list
>> of changes below.
>>
>> NOTE: The build platform has been changed for this release. Please
watch
>> out extra carefully for anomalies.
>>
>> You can get it from
>>
>> http://cran.r-project.org/src/base/R-2/R-2.11.0.tar.gz
>>
>> or wait for it to be mirrored at a CRAN site nearer to you.
>>
>> Binaries for various platforms will appear in due course.
>>
>> ? ? ? For the R Core Team
>>
>> ? ? ? Peter Dalgaard
>>
>> These are the md5sums for the freshly created files, in case you wish
>> to check that they are uncorrupted:
>>
>> MD5 (AUTHORS) = ac9746b4845ae866661f51cfc99262f5
>> MD5 (COPYING) = eb723b61539feef013de476e68b5c50a
>> MD5 (COPYING.LIB) = a6f89e2100d9b6cdffcea4f398e37343
>> MD5 (FAQ) = 5b653442bedab476a4eff7468192fb5f
>> MD5 (INSTALL) = 70447ae7f2c35233d3065b004aa4f331
>> MD5 (NEWS) = 59017734fb8474f98f994c7a5a27f9fb
>> MD5 (ONEWS) = a8c985af5ad5e9c7e0a9f502d07baeb4
>> MD5 (OONEWS) = 4f004de59e24a52d0f500063b4603bcb
>> MD5 (R-latest.tar.gz) = c6c1e866299f533617750889c729bfb3
>> MD5 (README) = 433182754c05c2cf7a04ad0da474a1d0
>> MD5 (RESOURCES) = 020479f381d5f9038dcb18708997f5da
>> MD5 (THANKS) = f2ccf22f3e20ebaa86f8ee5cc6b0f655
>> MD5 (R-2/R-2.11.0.tar.gz) = c6c1e866299f533617750889c729bfb3
>>
>> This is the relevant part of the NEWS file:
>>
>> ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.11.0
>>
>>
>> SIGNIFICANT USER-VISIBLE CHANGES
>>
>> ? ?o ? Packages must have been installed under R >= 2.10.0, as the
>> ? ? ? ?current help system is the only one now supported.
>>
>> ? ?o ? A port to 64-bit Windows is now available as well as binary
>> ? ? ? ?package repositiories: see the 'R Administration and
>> ? ? ? ?Installation Manual'.
>>
>> ? ?o ? Argument matching for primitive functions is now done in the
>> ? ? ? ?same way as for interpreted functions except for the deliberate
>> ? ? ? ?exceptions
>>
>> ? ? ? ? ? ?call switch .C .Fortran .Call .External
>>
>> ? ? ? ?all of which use positional matching for their first argument,
>> ? ? ? ?and also some internal-use-only primitives.
>>
>> ? ?o ? The default device for command-line R at the console on Mac OS X
>> ? ? ? ?is now quartz() and not X11().
>>
>>
>> NEW FEATURES
>>
>> ? ?o ? The 'open' modes for connections are now interpreted
more
>> ? ? ? ?consistently. ?open = "r" is now equivalent to open =
"rt" for
>> ? ? ? ?all connections. ?The default open = "" now means
"rt" for all
>> ? ? ? ?connections except the compressed file connections gzfile(),
>> ? ? ? ?bzfile() and xzfile() for which it means "rb".
>>
>> ? ?o ? R CMD INSTALL now uses the internal untar() in package utils:
>> ? ? ? ?this ensures that all platforms can install bzip2- and
>> ? ? ? ?xz-compressed tarballs. ?In case this causes problems (as it
>> ? ? ? ?has on some Windows file systems when run from Cygwin tools)
>> ? ? ? ?it can be overridden by the environment variable
>> ? ? ? ?R_INSTALL_TAR: setting this to a modern external tar program
>> ? ? ? ?will speed up unpacking of large (tens of Mb or more)
>> ? ? ? ?tarballs.
>>
>> ? ?o ? help(try.all.packages = TRUE) is much faster (although the
>> ? ? ? ?time taken by the OS to find all the packages the first time
>> ? ? ? ?it is used can dominate the time).
>>
>> ? ?o ? R CMD check has a new option '--timings' to record
>> ? ? ? ?per-example timings in file
<pkg>.Rcheck/<pkg>-Ex.timings.
>>
>> ? ?o ? The TRE library has been updated to version 0.8.0 (minor
bugfixes).
>>
>> ? ?o ? grep[l], [g]sub and [g]regexpr now work in bytes in an 8-bit
>> ? ? ? ?locales if there is no marked UTF-8 input string: this will be
>> ? ? ? ?somewhat faster, and for [g]sub() give the result in the
>> ? ? ? ?native encoding rather than in UTF-8 (which returns to the
>> ? ? ? ?behaviour prior to R 2.10.0).
>>
>> ? ?o ? A new argument 'skipCalls' has been added to browser()
so that
>> ? ? ? ?it can report the original context when called by other
>> ? ? ? ?debugging functions.
>>
>> ? ?o ? More validity checking of UTF-8 and MBCS strings is done by
>> ? ? ? ?agrep() and the regular-expression matching functions.
>>
>> ? ?o ? The undocumented restriction on gregexpr() to length(text) >
0
>> ? ? ? ?has been removed.
>>
>> ? ?o ? Package tcltk now sends strings to Tcl in UTF-8: this means
>> ? ? ? ?that strings with a marked UTF-8 encoding are supported in
>> ? ? ? ?non-UTF-8 locales.
>>
>> ? ?o ? The graphics engine now supports rendering of raster (bitmap)
>> ? ? ? ?images, though not all graphics devices can provide (full)
>> ? ? ? ?support. ?Packages providing graphics devices (e.g., Cairo,
>> ? ? ? ?RSvgDevice, cairoDevice) will need to be reinstalled.
>>
>> ? ? ? ?There is also support in the graphics engine for capturing
>> ? ? ? ?raster images from graphics devices (again not supported
>> ? ? ? ?on all graphics devices).
>>
>> ? ?o ? R CMD check now also checks if the package and namespace can
>> ? ? ? ?be unloaded: this provides a check of the .Last.lib() and
>> ? ? ? ?.onUnload() hook functions (unless --install=fake).
>>
>> ? ?o ? prop.table(x) now accepts a one-dimensional table for x.
>>
>> ? ?o ? A new function vapply() has been added, based on a suggestion
>> ? ? ? ?from Bill Dunlap. ?It requires that a template for the
>> ? ? ? ?function value be specified, and uses it to determine the
>> ? ? ? ?output type and to check for consistency in the function
>> ? ? ? ?values.
>>
>> ? ?o ? The main HTML help page now links to a reformatted copy of
>> ? ? ? ?this NEWS file. (Suggested by Henrik Bengtsson.) ?Package
>> ? ? ? ?index files link to the package DESCRIPTION and NEWS files and
>> ? ? ? ?a list of demos when using dynamic help.
>>
>> ? ?o ? The [ method for class "AsIs" allows the next method
to change
>> ? ? ? ?the underlying class. ?(Wish of Jens Oehlschl?gel.)
>>
>> ? ?o ? write.csv[2] no longer allow 'append' to be changed: as
ever,
>> ? ? ? ?direct calls to write.table() give more flexibility as well as
>> ? ? ? ?more room for error.
>>
>> ? ?o ? The index page for HTML help for a package now collapses
>> ? ? ? ?multiple signatures for S4 methods into a single entry.
>>
>> ? ?o ? The use of '.required' by require() and detach() has
been
>> ? ? ? ?replaced by '.Depends' which is set from the
'Depends' field
>> ? ? ? ?of a package (even in packages with name spaces). ?By default
>> ? ? ? ?detach() prevents such dependencies from being detached: this
>> ? ? ? ?can be overridden by the argument 'force'.
>>
>> ? ?o ? bquote() has been extended to work on function definitions
>> ? ? ? ?(wish of PR#14031).
>>
>> ? ?o ? detach() when applied to an object other than a package
>> ? ? ? ?returns the environment that has been detached, to parallel
>> ? ? ? ?attach().
>>
>> ? ?o ? readline() in non-interactive use returns "" and does
not
>> ? ? ? ?attempt to read from the 'terminal'.
>>
>> ? ?o ? New function file_ext() in package 'tools'.
>>
>> ? ?o ? xtfrm() is now primitive and internally generic, as this allows
>> ? ? ? ?S4 methods to be set on it without name-space scoping issues.
>>
>> ? ? ? ?There are now "AsIs" and "difftime" methods,
and the default
>> ? ? ? ?method uses unclass(x) if is.numeric(x) is true (which will be
>> ? ? ? ?faster but relies on is.numeric() having been set correctly
>> ? ? ? ?for the class).
>>
>> ? ?o ? is.numeric(x) is now false for a "difftime" object
>> ? ? ? ?(multiplication and division make no sense for such objects).
>>
>> ? ?o ? The default method of weighted.mean(x, w) coerces 'w' to
be
>> ? ? ? ?numeric (aka double); previously only integer weights were
>> ? ? ? ?coerced. ?Zero weights are handled specially so an infinite
>> ? ? ? ?value with zero weight does not force an NaN result.
>>
>> ? ? ? ?There is now a "difftime" method.
>>
>> ? ?o ? bug.report() now has 'package' and 'lib.loc'
arguments to
>> ? ? ? ?generate bug reports about packages. ?When this is used, it
>> ? ? ? ?looks for a BugReports field in the package DESCRIPTION file,
>> ? ? ? ?which will be assumed to be a URL at which to submit the
>> ? ? ? ?report, and otherwise generates an email to the package
>> ? ? ? ?maintainer. ?(Suggested by Barry Rowlingson.)
>>
>> ? ?o ? quantile() now has a method for the date-time class
"POSIXt",
>> ? ? ? ?and types 1 and 3 (which never interpolate) work for Dates and
>> ? ? ? ?ordered factors.
>>
>> ? ?o ? length(<POSIXlt>) ?now returns the length of the
corresponding
>> ? ? ? ?abstract timedate-vector rather than always 9 (the length of the
>> ? ? ? ?underlying list structure). ?(Wish of PR#14073 and PR#10507.)
>>
>> ? ?o ? The readline completion backend no longer sorts possible
>> ? ? ? ?completions alphabetically (e.g., function argument names) if
>> ? ? ? ?R was built with readline >= 6.
>>
>> ? ?o ? select.list() gains a 'graphics' argument to allow
Windows/Mac
>> ? ? ? ?users to choose the text interface. ?This changes the
>> ? ? ? ?behaviour of new.packages(ask=TRUE) to be like
>> ? ? ? ?update.packages(ask=TRUE) on those platforms in using a text
>> ? ? ? ?menu: use ask="graphics" for a graphical menu.
>>
>> ? ?o ? New function chooseBioCmirror() to set the
"BioC_mirror" option.
>>
>> ? ?o ? The R grammar prevents using the argument 'name' in
signatures
>> ? ? ? ?of S4 methods for '$' and '$<-', since they
will always be
>> ? ? ? ?called with a character string value for 'name'. ?The
implicit
>> ? ? ? ?S4 generic functions have been changed to reflect this:
>> ? ? ? ?packages which included 'name' in the signature of their
>> ? ? ? ?methods need to be updated and re-installed.
>>
>> ? ?o ? The handling of the 'method' argument of glm() has been
>> ? ? ? ?refined following suggestions by Ioannis Kosmidis and Heather
>> ? ? ? ?Turner.
>>
>> ? ?o ? str() gains a new argument 'list.len' with default 99,
limiting the
>> ? ? ? ?number of list() items (per level), thanks to suggestions from
>> ? ? ? ?David Winsenius.
>>
>> ? ?o ? Having formal arguments of an S4 method in a different order
>> ? ? ? ?from the generic is now an error (the warning having been
>> ? ? ? ?ignored by some package maintainers for a long time).
>>
>> ? ?o ? New functions enc2native() and enc2utf8() convert character
>> ? ? ? ?vectors with possibly marked encodings to the current locale and
>> ? ? ? ?UTF-8 respectively.
>>
>> ? ?o ? Unrecognized escapes and embedded nuls in character strings are
>> ? ? ? ?now an error, not just a warning. ?Thus option
"warnEscapes"
>> ? ? ? ?is no longer needed. ?rawToChar() now removes trailing nuls
>> ? ? ? ?silently, but other embedded nuls become errors.
>>
>> ? ?o ? Informational messages about masked objects displayed when a
>> ? ? ? ?package is attached are now more compact, using strwrap()
>> ? ? ? ?instead of one object per line.
>>
>> ? ?o ? print.rle() gains argument 'prefix'.
>>
>> ? ?o ? download.file() gains a "curl" method, mainly for use
on
>> ? ? ? ?platforms which have 'curl' but not 'wget', but
also for some
>> ? ? ? ?hard-to-access URLs.
>>
>> ? ?o ? In Rd, \eqn and \deqn will render in HTML (and convert to text)
>> ? ? ? ?upper- and lower-case Greek letters (entered as \alpha ...),
>> ? ? ? ?\ldots, \dots, \ge and \le.
>>
>> ? ?o ? utf8ToInt() and intToUtf8() now map NA inputs to NA outputs.
>>
>> ? ?o ? file() has a new argument 'raw' which may help if it is
used
>> ? ? ? ?with something other than a regular file, e.g. a character
device.
>>
>> ? ?o ? New function strtoi(), a wrapper for the C function strtol.
>>
>> ? ?o ? as.octmode() and as.hexmode() now allow inputs of length other
>> ? ? ? ?than one.
>>
>> ? ? ? ?The format() and print() methods for "octmode" now
preserve
>> ? ? ? ?names and dimensions (as those for "hexmode" did).
>>
>> ? ? ? ?The format() methods for classes "octmode" and
"hexmode" gain
>> ? ? ? ?a 'width' argument.
>>
>> ? ?o ? seq.int() returns an integer result in some further cases
>> ? ? ? ?where seq() does, e.g. seq.int(1L, 9L, by = 2L).
>>
>> ? ?o ? Added \subsection{}{} macro to Rd syntax, for subsections
>> ? ? ? ?within sections.
>>
>> ? ?o ? n-dimensional arrays with dimension names can now be indexed
>> ? ? ? ?by an n-column character matrix. The indices are matched
>> ? ? ? ?against the dimension names. ?NA indices are propagated to the
>> ? ? ? ?result. ?Unmatched values and "" are not allowed and
result in
>> ? ? ? ?an error.
>>
>> ? ?o ? interaction(drop=TRUE) uses less memory (related to PR#14121).
>>
>> ? ?o ? summary() methods have been added to the "srcref" and
>> ? ? ? ?"srcfile" classes, and various encoding issues have
been
>> ? ? ? ?cleaned up.
>>
>> ? ?o ? If option "checkPackageLicense" is set to TRUE (not
currently
>> ? ? ? ?the default), users will be asked to agree to
>> ? ? ? ?non-known-to-be-FOSS package licences at first use.
>>
>> ? ?o ? Checking setAs(a,b) methods only gives a message instead of a
>> ? ? ? ?warning, when one of a or b is unknown.
>>
>> ? ?o ? New function norm() to compute a matrix norm.
>> ? ? ? ?norm() and also backsolve() and sample() have implicit S4
generics.
>>
>> ? ?o ? Renviron.site and Rprofile.site can have architecture-specific
>> ? ? ? ?versions on systems with sub-architectures.
>>
>> ? ?o ? R CMD check now (by default) also checks Rd files for
>> ? ? ? ?auto-generated content in need of editing, and missing argument
>> ? ? ? ?descriptions.
>>
>> ? ?o ? aggregate() gains a formula method thanks to a contribution by
>> ? ? ? ?Arni Magnusson. ?The data frame method now allows summary
>> ? ? ? ?functions to return arbitrarily many values.
>>
>> ? ?o ? path.expand() now propagates NA values rather than converting
them
>> ? ? ? ?to "NA".
>>
>> ? ?o ? file.show() now disallows NA values for file names, headers, and
>> ? ? ? ?pager.
>>
>> ? ?o ? The 'fuzz' used by seq() and seq.int() has been reduced
from
>> ? ? ? ?1e-7 to 1e-10, which should be ample for the double-precision
>> ? ? ? ?calculations used in R. ?It ensures that the fuzz never comes
>> ? ? ? ?into play with sequences of integers (wish of PR#14169).
>>
>> ? ?o ? The default value of RSiteSearch(restrict=) has been changed
>> ? ? ? ?to include vignettes but to exclude R-help. ?The R-help
>> ? ? ? ?archives available have been split, with a new option of
>> ? ? ? ?"Rhelp10" for those from 2010.
>>
>> ? ?o ? New function rasterImage() in the 'graphics' package for
drawing
>> ? ? ? ?raster images.
>>
>> ? ?o ? stats:::extractAIC.coxph() now omits aliased terms when
computing
>> ? ? ? ?the degrees of freedom (suggestion of Terry Therneau).
>>
>> ? ?o ? cor() and cov() now test for misuse with non-numeric
>> ? ? ? ?arguments, such as the non-bug report PR#14207.
>>
>> ? ?o ? pchisq(ncp =, log.p = TRUE) is more accurate for probabilities
>> ? ? ? ?near one. ?E.g. pchisq(80, 4, ncp=1, log.p=TRUE). ?(Maybe what
>> ? ? ? ?was meant in PR#14126.)
>>
>> ? ?o ? maintainer() has been added, to give convenient access to the
>> ? ? ? ?name of the maintainer of a package (contributed by David
>> ? ? ? ?Scott).
>>
>> ? ?o ? sample() and sample.int() allow zero items to be sampled from
>> ? ? ? ?a zero-length input. ?sample.int() gains a default value
>> ? ? ? ?'size=n' to be more similar to sample().
>>
>> ? ?o ? switch() returned NULL on error (not previously documented on
>> ? ? ? ?the help page): it now does so invisibly, analogously to
>> ? ? ? ?if-without-else.
>>
>> ? ? ? ?It is now primitive: this means that EXPR is always matched to
>> ? ? ? ?the first argument and there is no danger of partial matching
>> ? ? ? ?to later named arguments.
>>
>> ? ?o ? Primitive functions UseMethod(), attr(), attr<-(), on.exit(),
>> ? ? ? ?retracemem() and substitute() now use standard argument
>> ? ? ? ?matching (rather than positional matching). ?This means that
>> ? ? ? ?all multi-argument primitives which are not internal now use
>> ? ? ? ?standard argument matching except where positional matching is
>> ? ? ? ?desirable (as for switch(), call(), .C() ...).
>>
>> ? ?o ? All the one-argument primitives now check that any name
>> ? ? ? ?supplied for their first argument is a partial match to the
>> ? ? ? ?argument name as documented on the help page: this also
>> ? ? ? ?applies to replacement functions of two arguments.
>>
>> ? ?o ? base::which() uses a new .Internal function when arr.ind is
>> ? ? ? ?FALSE resulting in a 10x speedup. ?Thanks to Patrick Aboyoun
>> ? ? ? ?for implementation suggestions.
>>
>> ? ?o ? Help conversion to text now uses the first part of \enc{}{}
>> ? ? ? ?markup if it is representable in the current output encoding.
>> ? ? ? ?On the other hand, conversion to LaTeX with the default
>> ? ? ? ?outputEncoding = "ASCII" uses the second part.
>>
>> ? ?o ? A new class "listOfMethods" has been introduced to
represent
>> ? ? ? ?the methods in a methods table, to replace the deprecated
>> ? ? ? ?class "MethodsList".
>>
>> ? ?o ? any() and all() return early if possible. ?This may speed up
>> ? ? ? ?operations on long vectors.
>>
>> ? ?o ? strptime() now accepts "%z" (for the offset from UTC
in the
>> ? ? ? ?RFC822 format of +/-hhmm).
>>
>> ? ?o ? The PCRE library has been updated to version 8.02, a bug-fix
>> ? ? ? ?release which also updates tables to Unicode 5.02.
>>
>> ? ?o ? Functions which may use a graphical select.list() (including
>> ? ? ? ?menu() and install.packages()) now check on a Unix-alike that
>> ? ? ? ?Tk can be started (and not just
>> ? ? ? ?capabilities("tcltk") &&
capabilities("X11")).
>>
>> ? ?o ? The parser no longer marks strings containing octal or hex
>> ? ? ? ?escapes as being in UTF-8 when entered in a UTF-8 locale.
>>
>> ? ?o ? On platforms with cairo but not Pango (notably Mac OS X) the
>> ? ? ? ?initial default X11() type is set to "Xlib": this
avoids
>> ? ? ? ?several problems with font selection when done by cairo rather
>> ? ? ? ?than Pango (at least on Mac OS X).
>>
>> ? ?o ? New arrayInd() such that which(x, arr.ind = TRUE) for an array
>> ? ? ? ?'x' is now equivalent to arrayInd(which(x), dim(x),
dimnames(x)).
>>
>>
>> DEPRECATED & DEFUNCT
>>
>> ? ?o ? Bundles of packages are defunct.
>>
>> ? ?o ? stats::clearNames() is defunct: use unname().
>>
>> ? ?o ? Basic regular expressions are defunct, and strsplit(), grep(),
>> ? ? ? ?grepl(), sub(), gsub(), regexpr() and gregexpr() no longer
>> ? ? ? ?have an 'extended' argument.
>>
>> ? ?o ? methods::trySilent() is defunct.
>>
>> ? ?o ? index.search() (which was deprecated in 2.10.0) is no longer
>> ? ? ? ?exported and has a different argument list.
>>
>> ? ?o ? Use of multiple arguments to return() is now defunct.
>>
>> ? ?o ? The use of UseMethod() with more than two arguments is now
defunct.
>>
>> ? ?o ? In the 'methods' package, the MethodsList metadata
objects which
>> ? ? ? ?had been superseded by hash tables (environments) since R
>> ? ? ? ?2.8.0 are being phased out. ?Objects of this class are no
>> ? ? ? ?longer assigned or used as metadata by the package.
>>
>> ? ? ? ?getMethods() is now deprecated, with its internal use replaced
>> ? ? ? ?by findMethods() and other changes. ?Creating objects from the
>> ? ? ? ?MethodsList class is also deprecated.
>>
>> ? ?o ? Parsing strings containing both octal/hex and Unicode escapes
>> ? ? ? ?now gives a warning and will become an error in R 2.12.0.
>>
>>
>> INSTALLATION
>>
>> ? ?o ? UTF-8 is now used for the reference manual and package
>> ? ? ? ?manuals. ?This requires LaTeX '2005/12/01' or later.
>>
>> ? ?o ? configure looks for a POSIX compliant tr, Solaris's
>> ? ? ? ?/usr/ucb/tr having been found to cause Rdiff to malfunction.
>>
>> ? ?o ? configure is now generated with autoconf-2.65, which works
>> ? ? ? ?better on recent systems and on Mac OS X.
>>
>>
>> PACKAGE INSTALLATION
>>
>> ? ?o ? Characters in R source which are not translatable to the
>> ? ? ? ?current locale are now handled more tolerantly: ?these will be
>> ? ? ? ?converted to hex codes with a warning. ?Such characters are
>> ? ? ? ?only really portable if they appear in comments.
>>
>> ? ?o ? R CMD INSTALL now tests that the installed package can be loaded
>> ? ? ? ?(and backs out the installation if it cannot): this can be
>> ? ? ? ?suppressed by --no-test-load. ?This avoids installing/updating
>> ? ? ? ?a package that cannot be used: common causes of failures to
>> ? ? ? ?load are missing/incompatible external software and
>> ? ? ? ?missing/broken dependent packages.
>>
>> ? ?o ? Package installation on Windows for a package with a src
>> ? ? ? ?directory now checks if a DLL is created unless there is a
>> ? ? ? ?src/Makefile.win file: this helps catch broken installations
>> ? ? ? ?where the toolchain has not reported problems in building the
DLL.
>> ? ? ? ?(Note: this can be any DLL, not just one named
<pkg-name>.dll.)
>>
>>
>> BUG FIXES
>>
>> ? ?o ? Using with(), eval() etc with a list with some unnamed
>> ? ? ? ?elements now works. (PR#14035)
>>
>> ? ?o ? The "quick" dispatch of S4 methods for primitive
functions was
>> ? ? ? ?not happening, forcing a search each time. ?(Dispatch for
>> ? ? ? ?closures was not affected.) ?A side effect is that default
>> ? ? ? ?values for arguments in a method that do not have defaults in
>> ? ? ? ?the generic will now be ignored.
>>
>> ? ?o ? Trying to dispatch S4 methods for primitives during the search
>> ? ? ? ?for inherited methods slows that search down and potentially
>> ? ? ? ?could cause an infinite recursion. ?An internal switch was
>> ? ? ? ?added to turn off all such methods from
>> ? ? ? ?findInheritedMethods().
>>
>> ? ?o ? R framework installation (on Mac OS X) would not work properly
>> ? ? ? ?if a rogue Resources directory was present at the top level.
>> ? ? ? ?Such a non-symlink will now be renamed to Resources.old (and
>> ? ? ? ?anything previously named Resources.old removed) as part of
>> ? ? ? ?the framework installation process.
>>
>> ? ?o ? The checks for conforming S4 method arguments could fail when
>> ? ? ? ?the signature of the generic function omitted some of the
>> ? ? ? ?formal arguments (in addition to ...). ?Arguments omitted from
>> ? ? ? ?the method definition but conforming (per the documentation)
>> ? ? ? ?should now be ignored (treated as "ANY") in
dispatching.
>>
>> ? ?o ? The computations for S4 method evaluation when '...' was
in the
>> ? ? ? ?signature could fail, treating '...' as an ordinary
symbol.
>> ? ? ? ?This has been fixed, for the known cases.
>>
>> ? ?o ? Various ar() fitting methods have more protection for singular
>> ? ? ? ?fits.
>>
>> ? ?o ? callNextMethod now works again with the drop= argument in `[`
>>
>> ? ?o ? parse() and parse_Rd() miscounted columns when multibyte UTF-8
>> ? ? ? ?characters were present.
>>
>> ? ?o ? Formatting of help pages has had minor improvements: extra
>> ? ? ? ?blank lines have been removed from the text format, and empty
>> ? ? ? ?package labels removed from HTML.
>>
>> ? ?o ? cor(A, B) where A has n x 1 and B a 1-dimensional array
>> ? ? ? ?segfaulted or gave an internal error.
>> ? ? ? ?(The case cor(B, A) was PR#7116.)
>>
>> ? ?o ? cut.POSIXt() applied to a start value after the DST transition
>> ? ? ? ?on a DST-change day could give the wrong time for
'breaks' in units
>> ? ? ? ?of days or longer. ?(PR#14208)
>>
>> ? ?o ? do_par() UNPROTECTed too early (PR#14214)
>>
>> ? ?o ? subassignment x[[....]] <- y didn't check for a
zero-length
>> ? ? ? ?right hand side, and inserted rubbish value. (PR#14217)
>>
>> ? ?o ? fisher.test() no longer gives a P-value *very* slightly > 1,
>> ? ? ? ?in some borderline cases.
>>
>> ? ?o ? Internal function matchArgs no longer modifies the general
>> ? ? ? ?purpose bits of the SEXPs that make up the formals list of R
>> ? ? ? ?functions. ?This fixes an invalid error message that would
>> ? ? ? ?occur when a garbage collection triggered a second call to
>> ? ? ? ?matchArgs for the same function via a finalizer.
>>
>> ? ?o ? gsub() in 2.10.x could fail from stack overflow for extremely
>> ? ? ? ?long strings due to temporary data being allocated on the
>> ? ? ? ?stack. ?Also, gsub() with fixed=TRUE is in some circumstances
>> ? ? ? ?considerably faster.
>>
>> ? ?o ? Several primitives, including attributes(), attr<-()
>> ? ? ? ?interactive(), nargs() and proc.time(), did not check that
>> ? ? ? ?they were called with the correct number of arguments.
>>
>> ? ?o ? A potential race condition in list.files() when other processes
>> ? ? ? ?are operating on the directory has been fixed; the code now
>> ? ? ? ?dynamically allocates memory for file listings in a single
>> ? ? ? ?pass instead of making an initial count pass.
>>
>> ? ?o ? mean(x, trim=, na.rm = FALSE) failed to return NA if 'x'
>> ? ? ? ?contained missing values. ?(Reported by Bill Dunlap.)
>>
>> ? ?o ? Extreme tail behavior of, pbeta() {and hence pf()}, e.g.,
>> ? ? ? ?pbeta(x, 3, 2200, lower.tail=FALSE, log.p=TRUE) now returns
>> ? ? ? ?finite values instead of jumping to -Inf too early (PR#14230).
>>
>> ? ?o ? parse(text=x) misbehaved for objects 'x' that were not
coerced
>> ? ? ? ?internally to character, notably symbols. ?(Reported to
>> ? ? ? ?R-devel by Bill Dunlap.)
>>
>> ? ?o ? The internal C function 'coerceSymbol' now handles
coercion to
>> ? ? ? ?character, and warns if coercion fails (rather than silently
>> ? ? ? ?returning NULL). ?This allows a name to be given where a
>> ? ? ? ?character vector is required in functions which coerce
>> ? ? ? ?internally.
>>
>> ? ?o ? The interpretation by strptime() of %c was non-standard (not
>> ? ? ? ?that it is ever advisable to use locale- and system-specific
>> ? ? ? ?input formats).
>>
>> ? ?o ? capabilities("X11") now works the same way on Mac OS X
as on
>> ? ? ? ?other platforms (and as documented: it was always true for R
>> ? ? ? ?built with --with-aqua, as the CRAN builds are).
>>
>> ? ?o ? The X11() device with cairo but not Pango (notably Mac OS X)
>> ? ? ? ?now checks validity of text strings in UTF-8 locales (since
>> ? ? ? ?Pango does but cairo it seems does not).
>>
>> ? ?o ? read.fwf() misread multi-line records when n was specified.
>> ? ? ? ?(PR#14241)
>>
>> ? ?o ? all.equal(*, tolerance = e) passes the numeric tolerance also to
>> ? ? ? ?the comparison of the attributes.
>>
>> ? ?o ? pgamma(0,0), a boundary case, now returns 0, its limit from the
>> ? ? ? ?left, rather than the limit from the right.
>>
>> ? ?o ? Issuing POST requests to the internal web server could stall
>> ? ? ? ?the request under certain circumstances.
>>
>> ? ?o ? gzcon( <textConnection> ), an error, no longer damages the
>> ? ? ? ?connection (in a way to have it seg.fault). (PR#14237)
>>
>> ? ?o ? All the results from hist() now use the nominal 'breaks'
not
>> ? ? ? ?those adjusted by the numeric 'fuzz": in recent
versions the
>> ? ? ? ?nominal 'breaks' were reported but the 'density'
referred to
>> ? ? ? ?the intervals used in the calculation -- which mattered very
>> ? ? ? ?slightly for one of the extreme bins. ?(Based on a report by
>> ? ? ? ?Martin Becker.)
>>
>> ? ?o ? If xy[z].coords (used internally by many graphics functions) are
>> ? ? ? ?given a list as 'x', they now check that the list has
suitable
>> ? ? ? ?names and give a more informative error message. ?(PR#13936)
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Peter Dalgaard
>> Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
>> Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
>> Phone: (+45)38153501
>> Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk ?Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> R-announce at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-announce
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>> PLEASE do read the posting guide
>> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>
>
> ? ? ? ?[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide
http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>
>

Hi

On 23/04/2010 12:10 a.m., Tal Galili wrote:
> Hello Peter,
> Thank you, and the R core team, for the new release.
>
>
> I see that in R 2.11.0 there is now support for rendering of raster
(bitmap)
> images through rasterImage().
>
> I am wondering - can this be used to create a texture/fill-pattern for
> hist()/barplot()  ?
That is one possible application (see 
http://developer.r-project.org/Raster/raster-RFC.html)

Paul
> (A request made several times throughout the years on the mailing list.
> For example:
> http://osdir.com/ml/lang.r.general/2005-07/msg00799.html
> )
>
> (I am also sending this e-mail to the maintainers of lattice, ggplot2 and
> gplots in the hope for more perspectives)
>
> With much respect,
> Tal
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ----------------Contact
> Details:-------------------------------------------------------
> Contact me: Tal.Galili at gmail.com |  972-52-7275845
> Read me: www.talgalili.com (Hebrew) | www.biostatistics.co.il (Hebrew) |
> www.r-statistics.com (English)
>
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 12:01 PM, Peter Dalgaard<pd.mes at cbs.dk> 
wrote:
>
>> I've rolled up R-2.11.0.tar.gz a short while ago. This is a
development
>> release which contains a number of new features.
>>
>> Also, a number of mostly minor bugs have been fixed. See the full list
>> of changes below.
>>
>> NOTE: The build platform has been changed for this release. Please
watch
>> out extra carefully for anomalies.
>>
>> You can get it from
>>
>> http://cran.r-project.org/src/base/R-2/R-2.11.0.tar.gz
>>
>> or wait for it to be mirrored at a CRAN site nearer to you.
>>
>> Binaries for various platforms will appear in due course.
>>
>>        For the R Core Team
>>
>>        Peter Dalgaard
>>
>> These are the md5sums for the freshly created files, in case you wish
>> to check that they are uncorrupted:
>>
>> MD5 (AUTHORS) = ac9746b4845ae866661f51cfc99262f5
>> MD5 (COPYING) = eb723b61539feef013de476e68b5c50a
>> MD5 (COPYING.LIB) = a6f89e2100d9b6cdffcea4f398e37343
>> MD5 (FAQ) = 5b653442bedab476a4eff7468192fb5f
>> MD5 (INSTALL) = 70447ae7f2c35233d3065b004aa4f331
>> MD5 (NEWS) = 59017734fb8474f98f994c7a5a27f9fb
>> MD5 (ONEWS) = a8c985af5ad5e9c7e0a9f502d07baeb4
>> MD5 (OONEWS) = 4f004de59e24a52d0f500063b4603bcb
>> MD5 (R-latest.tar.gz) = c6c1e866299f533617750889c729bfb3
>> MD5 (README) = 433182754c05c2cf7a04ad0da474a1d0
>> MD5 (RESOURCES) = 020479f381d5f9038dcb18708997f5da
>> MD5 (THANKS) = f2ccf22f3e20ebaa86f8ee5cc6b0f655
>> MD5 (R-2/R-2.11.0.tar.gz) = c6c1e866299f533617750889c729bfb3
>>
>> This is the relevant part of the NEWS file:
>>
>>                 CHANGES IN R VERSION 2.11.0
>>
>>
>> SIGNIFICANT USER-VISIBLE CHANGES
>>
>>     o   Packages must have been installed under R>= 2.10.0, as the
>>         current help system is the only one now supported.
>>
>>     o   A port to 64-bit Windows is now available as well as binary
>>         package repositiories: see the 'R Administration and
>>         Installation Manual'.
>>
>>     o   Argument matching for primitive functions is now done in the
>>         same way as for interpreted functions except for the deliberate
>>         exceptions
>>
>>             call switch .C .Fortran .Call .External
>>
>>         all of which use positional matching for their first argument,
>>         and also some internal-use-only primitives.
>>
>>     o   The default device for command-line R at the console on Mac OS
X
>>         is now quartz() and not X11().
>>
>>
>> NEW FEATURES
>>
>>     o   The 'open' modes for connections are now interpreted
more
>>         consistently.  open = "r" is now equivalent to open =
"rt" for
>>         all connections.  The default open = "" now means
"rt" for all
>>         connections except the compressed file connections gzfile(),
>>         bzfile() and xzfile() for which it means "rb".
>>
>>     o   R CMD INSTALL now uses the internal untar() in package utils:
>>         this ensures that all platforms can install bzip2- and
>>         xz-compressed tarballs.  In case this causes problems (as it
>>         has on some Windows file systems when run from Cygwin tools)
>>         it can be overridden by the environment variable
>>         R_INSTALL_TAR: setting this to a modern external tar program
>>         will speed up unpacking of large (tens of Mb or more)
>>         tarballs.
>>
>>     o   help(try.all.packages = TRUE) is much faster (although the
>>         time taken by the OS to find all the packages the first time
>>         it is used can dominate the time).
>>
>>     o   R CMD check has a new option '--timings' to record
>>         per-example timings in
file<pkg>.Rcheck/<pkg>-Ex.timings.
>>
>>     o   The TRE library has been updated to version 0.8.0 (minor
bugfixes).
>>
>>     o   grep[l], [g]sub and [g]regexpr now work in bytes in an 8-bit
>>         locales if there is no marked UTF-8 input string: this will be
>>         somewhat faster, and for [g]sub() give the result in the
>>         native encoding rather than in UTF-8 (which returns to the
>>         behaviour prior to R 2.10.0).
>>
>>     o   A new argument 'skipCalls' has been added to browser()
so that
>>         it can report the original context when called by other
>>         debugging functions.
>>
>>     o   More validity checking of UTF-8 and MBCS strings is done by
>>         agrep() and the regular-expression matching functions.
>>
>>     o   The undocumented restriction on gregexpr() to length(text)> 
0
>>         has been removed.
>>
>>     o   Package tcltk now sends strings to Tcl in UTF-8: this means
>>         that strings with a marked UTF-8 encoding are supported in
>>         non-UTF-8 locales.
>>
>>     o   The graphics engine now supports rendering of raster (bitmap)
>>         images, though not all graphics devices can provide (full)
>>         support.  Packages providing graphics devices (e.g., Cairo,
>>         RSvgDevice, cairoDevice) will need to be reinstalled.
>>
>>         There is also support in the graphics engine for capturing
>>         raster images from graphics devices (again not supported
>>         on all graphics devices).
>>
>>     o   R CMD check now also checks if the package and namespace can
>>         be unloaded: this provides a check of the .Last.lib() and
>>         .onUnload() hook functions (unless --install=fake).
>>
>>     o   prop.table(x) now accepts a one-dimensional table for x.
>>
>>     o   A new function vapply() has been added, based on a suggestion
>>         from Bill Dunlap.  It requires that a template for the
>>         function value be specified, and uses it to determine the
>>         output type and to check for consistency in the function
>>         values.
>>
>>     o   The main HTML help page now links to a reformatted copy of
>>         this NEWS file. (Suggested by Henrik Bengtsson.)  Package
>>         index files link to the package DESCRIPTION and NEWS files and
>>         a list of demos when using dynamic help.
>>
>>     o   The [ method for class "AsIs" allows the next method
to change
>>         the underlying class.  (Wish of Jens Oehlschl?gel.)
>>
>>     o   write.csv[2] no longer allow 'append' to be changed: as
ever,
>>         direct calls to write.table() give more flexibility as well as
>>         more room for error.
>>
>>     o   The index page for HTML help for a package now collapses
>>         multiple signatures for S4 methods into a single entry.
>>
>>     o   The use of '.required' by require() and detach() has
been
>>         replaced by '.Depends' which is set from the
'Depends' field
>>         of a package (even in packages with name spaces).  By default
>>         detach() prevents such dependencies from being detached: this
>>         can be overridden by the argument 'force'.
>>
>>     o   bquote() has been extended to work on function definitions
>>         (wish of PR#14031).
>>
>>     o   detach() when applied to an object other than a package
>>         returns the environment that has been detached, to parallel
>>         attach().
>>
>>     o   readline() in non-interactive use returns "" and does
not
>>         attempt to read from the 'terminal'.
>>
>>     o   New function file_ext() in package 'tools'.
>>
>>     o   xtfrm() is now primitive and internally generic, as this allows
>>         S4 methods to be set on it without name-space scoping issues.
>>
>>         There are now "AsIs" and "difftime"
methods, and the default
>>         method uses unclass(x) if is.numeric(x) is true (which will be
>>         faster but relies on is.numeric() having been set correctly
>>         for the class).
>>
>>     o   is.numeric(x) is now false for a "difftime" object
>>         (multiplication and division make no sense for such objects).
>>
>>     o   The default method of weighted.mean(x, w) coerces 'w'
to be
>>         numeric (aka double); previously only integer weights were
>>         coerced.  Zero weights are handled specially so an infinite
>>         value with zero weight does not force an NaN result.
>>
>>         There is now a "difftime" method.
>>
>>     o   bug.report() now has 'package' and 'lib.loc'
arguments to
>>         generate bug reports about packages.  When this is used, it
>>         looks for a BugReports field in the package DESCRIPTION file,
>>         which will be assumed to be a URL at which to submit the
>>         report, and otherwise generates an email to the package
>>         maintainer.  (Suggested by Barry Rowlingson.)
>>
>>     o   quantile() now has a method for the date-time class
"POSIXt",
>>         and types 1 and 3 (which never interpolate) work for Dates and
>>         ordered factors.
>>
>>     o   length(<POSIXlt>)  now returns the length of the
corresponding
>>         abstract timedate-vector rather than always 9 (the length of
the
>>         underlying list structure).  (Wish of PR#14073 and PR#10507.)
>>
>>     o   The readline completion backend no longer sorts possible
>>         completions alphabetically (e.g., function argument names) if
>>         R was built with readline>= 6.
>>
>>     o   select.list() gains a 'graphics' argument to allow
Windows/Mac
>>         users to choose the text interface.  This changes the
>>         behaviour of new.packages(ask=TRUE) to be like
>>         update.packages(ask=TRUE) on those platforms in using a text
>>         menu: use ask="graphics" for a graphical menu.
>>
>>     o   New function chooseBioCmirror() to set the
"BioC_mirror" option.
>>
>>     o   The R grammar prevents using the argument 'name' in
signatures
>>         of S4 methods for '$' and '$<-', since they
will always be
>>         called with a character string value for 'name'.  The
implicit
>>         S4 generic functions have been changed to reflect this:
>>         packages which included 'name' in the signature of
their
>>         methods need to be updated and re-installed.
>>
>>     o   The handling of the 'method' argument of glm() has been
>>         refined following suggestions by Ioannis Kosmidis and Heather
>>         Turner.
>>
>>     o   str() gains a new argument 'list.len' with default 99,
limiting the
>>         number of list() items (per level), thanks to suggestions from
>>         David Winsenius.
>>
>>     o   Having formal arguments of an S4 method in a different order
>>         from the generic is now an error (the warning having been
>>         ignored by some package maintainers for a long time).
>>
>>     o   New functions enc2native() and enc2utf8() convert character
>>         vectors with possibly marked encodings to the current locale
and
>>         UTF-8 respectively.
>>
>>     o   Unrecognized escapes and embedded nuls in character strings are
>>         now an error, not just a warning.  Thus option
"warnEscapes"
>>         is no longer needed.  rawToChar() now removes trailing nuls
>>         silently, but other embedded nuls become errors.
>>
>>     o   Informational messages about masked objects displayed when a
>>         package is attached are now more compact, using strwrap()
>>         instead of one object per line.
>>
>>     o   print.rle() gains argument 'prefix'.
>>
>>     o   download.file() gains a "curl" method, mainly for use
on
>>         platforms which have 'curl' but not 'wget', but
also for some
>>         hard-to-access URLs.
>>
>>     o   In Rd, \eqn and \deqn will render in HTML (and convert to text)
>>         upper- and lower-case Greek letters (entered as \alpha ...),
>>         \ldots, \dots, \ge and \le.
>>
>>     o   utf8ToInt() and intToUtf8() now map NA inputs to NA outputs.
>>
>>     o   file() has a new argument 'raw' which may help if it is
used
>>         with something other than a regular file, e.g. a character
device.
>>
>>     o   New function strtoi(), a wrapper for the C function strtol.
>>
>>     o   as.octmode() and as.hexmode() now allow inputs of length other
>>         than one.
>>
>>         The format() and print() methods for "octmode" now
preserve
>>         names and dimensions (as those for "hexmode" did).
>>
>>         The format() methods for classes "octmode" and
"hexmode" gain
>>         a 'width' argument.
>>
>>     o   seq.int() returns an integer result in some further cases
>>         where seq() does, e.g. seq.int(1L, 9L, by = 2L).
>>
>>     o   Added \subsection{}{} macro to Rd syntax, for subsections
>>         within sections.
>>
>>     o   n-dimensional arrays with dimension names can now be indexed
>>         by an n-column character matrix. The indices are matched
>>         against the dimension names.  NA indices are propagated to the
>>         result.  Unmatched values and "" are not allowed and
result in
>>         an error.
>>
>>     o   interaction(drop=TRUE) uses less memory (related to PR#14121).
>>
>>     o   summary() methods have been added to the "srcref" and
>>         "srcfile" classes, and various encoding issues have
been
>>         cleaned up.
>>
>>     o   If option "checkPackageLicense" is set to TRUE (not
currently
>>         the default), users will be asked to agree to
>>         non-known-to-be-FOSS package licences at first use.
>>
>>     o   Checking setAs(a,b) methods only gives a message instead of a
>>         warning, when one of a or b is unknown.
>>
>>     o   New function norm() to compute a matrix norm.
>>         norm() and also backsolve() and sample() have implicit S4
generics.
>>
>>     o   Renviron.site and Rprofile.site can have architecture-specific
>>         versions on systems with sub-architectures.
>>
>>     o   R CMD check now (by default) also checks Rd files for
>>         auto-generated content in need of editing, and missing argument
>>         descriptions.
>>
>>     o   aggregate() gains a formula method thanks to a contribution by
>>         Arni Magnusson.  The data frame method now allows summary
>>         functions to return arbitrarily many values.
>>
>>     o   path.expand() now propagates NA values rather than converting
them
>>         to "NA".
>>
>>     o   file.show() now disallows NA values for file names, headers,
and
>>         pager.
>>
>>     o   The 'fuzz' used by seq() and seq.int() has been reduced
from
>>         1e-7 to 1e-10, which should be ample for the double-precision
>>         calculations used in R.  It ensures that the fuzz never comes
>>         into play with sequences of integers (wish of PR#14169).
>>
>>     o   The default value of RSiteSearch(restrict=) has been changed
>>         to include vignettes but to exclude R-help.  The R-help
>>         archives available have been split, with a new option of
>>         "Rhelp10" for those from 2010.
>>
>>     o   New function rasterImage() in the 'graphics' package
for drawing
>>         raster images.
>>
>>     o   stats:::extractAIC.coxph() now omits aliased terms when
computing
>>         the degrees of freedom (suggestion of Terry Therneau).
>>
>>     o   cor() and cov() now test for misuse with non-numeric
>>         arguments, such as the non-bug report PR#14207.
>>
>>     o   pchisq(ncp =, log.p = TRUE) is more accurate for probabilities
>>         near one.  E.g. pchisq(80, 4, ncp=1, log.p=TRUE).  (Maybe what
>>         was meant in PR#14126.)
>>
>>     o   maintainer() has been added, to give convenient access to the
>>         name of the maintainer of a package (contributed by David
>>         Scott).
>>
>>     o   sample() and sample.int() allow zero items to be sampled from
>>         a zero-length input.  sample.int() gains a default value
>>         'size=n' to be more similar to sample().
>>
>>     o   switch() returned NULL on error (not previously documented on
>>         the help page): it now does so invisibly, analogously to
>>         if-without-else.
>>
>>         It is now primitive: this means that EXPR is always matched to
>>         the first argument and there is no danger of partial matching
>>         to later named arguments.
>>
>>     o   Primitive functions UseMethod(), attr(), attr<-(),
on.exit(),
>>         retracemem() and substitute() now use standard argument
>>         matching (rather than positional matching).  This means that
>>         all multi-argument primitives which are not internal now use
>>         standard argument matching except where positional matching is
>>         desirable (as for switch(), call(), .C() ...).
>>
>>     o   All the one-argument primitives now check that any name
>>         supplied for their first argument is a partial match to the
>>         argument name as documented on the help page: this also
>>         applies to replacement functions of two arguments.
>>
>>     o   base::which() uses a new .Internal function when arr.ind is
>>         FALSE resulting in a 10x speedup.  Thanks to Patrick Aboyoun
>>         for implementation suggestions.
>>
>>     o   Help conversion to text now uses the first part of \enc{}{}
>>         markup if it is representable in the current output encoding.
>>         On the other hand, conversion to LaTeX with the default
>>         outputEncoding = "ASCII" uses the second part.
>>
>>     o   A new class "listOfMethods" has been introduced to
represent
>>         the methods in a methods table, to replace the deprecated
>>         class "MethodsList".
>>
>>     o   any() and all() return early if possible.  This may speed up
>>         operations on long vectors.
>>
>>     o   strptime() now accepts "%z" (for the offset from UTC
in the
>>         RFC822 format of +/-hhmm).
>>
>>     o   The PCRE library has been updated to version 8.02, a bug-fix
>>         release which also updates tables to Unicode 5.02.
>>
>>     o   Functions which may use a graphical select.list() (including
>>         menu() and install.packages()) now check on a Unix-alike that
>>         Tk can be started (and not just
>>         capabilities("tcltk")&& 
capabilities("X11")).
>>
>>     o   The parser no longer marks strings containing octal or hex
>>         escapes as being in UTF-8 when entered in a UTF-8 locale.
>>
>>     o   On platforms with cairo but not Pango (notably Mac OS X) the
>>         initial default X11() type is set to "Xlib": this
avoids
>>         several problems with font selection when done by cairo rather
>>         than Pango (at least on Mac OS X).
>>
>>     o   New arrayInd() such that which(x, arr.ind = TRUE) for an array
>>         'x' is now equivalent to arrayInd(which(x), dim(x),
dimnames(x)).
>>
>>
>> DEPRECATED&  DEFUNCT
>>
>>     o   Bundles of packages are defunct.
>>
>>     o   stats::clearNames() is defunct: use unname().
>>
>>     o   Basic regular expressions are defunct, and strsplit(), grep(),
>>         grepl(), sub(), gsub(), regexpr() and gregexpr() no longer
>>         have an 'extended' argument.
>>
>>     o   methods::trySilent() is defunct.
>>
>>     o   index.search() (which was deprecated in 2.10.0) is no longer
>>         exported and has a different argument list.
>>
>>     o   Use of multiple arguments to return() is now defunct.
>>
>>     o   The use of UseMethod() with more than two arguments is now
defunct.
>>
>>     o   In the 'methods' package, the MethodsList metadata
objects which
>>         had been superseded by hash tables (environments) since R
>>         2.8.0 are being phased out.  Objects of this class are no
>>         longer assigned or used as metadata by the package.
>>
>>         getMethods() is now deprecated, with its internal use replaced
>>         by findMethods() and other changes.  Creating objects from the
>>         MethodsList class is also deprecated.
>>
>>     o   Parsing strings containing both octal/hex and Unicode escapes
>>         now gives a warning and will become an error in R 2.12.0.
>>
>>
>> INSTALLATION
>>
>>     o   UTF-8 is now used for the reference manual and package
>>         manuals.  This requires LaTeX '2005/12/01' or later.
>>
>>     o   configure looks for a POSIX compliant tr, Solaris's
>>         /usr/ucb/tr having been found to cause Rdiff to malfunction.
>>
>>     o   configure is now generated with autoconf-2.65, which works
>>         better on recent systems and on Mac OS X.
>>
>>
>> PACKAGE INSTALLATION
>>
>>     o   Characters in R source which are not translatable to the
>>         current locale are now handled more tolerantly:  these will be
>>         converted to hex codes with a warning.  Such characters are
>>         only really portable if they appear in comments.
>>
>>     o   R CMD INSTALL now tests that the installed package can be
loaded
>>         (and backs out the installation if it cannot): this can be
>>         suppressed by --no-test-load.  This avoids installing/updating
>>         a package that cannot be used: common causes of failures to
>>         load are missing/incompatible external software and
>>         missing/broken dependent packages.
>>
>>     o   Package installation on Windows for a package with a src
>>         directory now checks if a DLL is created unless there is a
>>         src/Makefile.win file: this helps catch broken installations
>>         where the toolchain has not reported problems in building the
DLL.
>>         (Note: this can be any DLL, not just one
named<pkg-name>.dll.)
>>
>>
>> BUG FIXES
>>
>>     o   Using with(), eval() etc with a list with some unnamed
>>         elements now works. (PR#14035)
>>
>>     o   The "quick" dispatch of S4 methods for primitive
functions was
>>         not happening, forcing a search each time.  (Dispatch for
>>         closures was not affected.)  A side effect is that default
>>         values for arguments in a method that do not have defaults in
>>         the generic will now be ignored.
>>
>>     o   Trying to dispatch S4 methods for primitives during the search
>>         for inherited methods slows that search down and potentially
>>         could cause an infinite recursion.  An internal switch was
>>         added to turn off all such methods from
>>         findInheritedMethods().
>>
>>     o   R framework installation (on Mac OS X) would not work properly
>>         if a rogue Resources directory was present at the top level.
>>         Such a non-symlink will now be renamed to Resources.old (and
>>         anything previously named Resources.old removed) as part of
>>         the framework installation process.
>>
>>     o   The checks for conforming S4 method arguments could fail when
>>         the signature of the generic function omitted some of the
>>         formal arguments (in addition to ...).  Arguments omitted from
>>         the method definition but conforming (per the documentation)
>>         should now be ignored (treated as "ANY") in
dispatching.
>>
>>     o   The computations for S4 method evaluation when '...'
was in the
>>         signature could fail, treating '...' as an ordinary
symbol.
>>         This has been fixed, for the known cases.
>>
>>     o   Various ar() fitting methods have more protection for singular
>>         fits.
>>
>>     o   callNextMethod now works again with the drop= argument in `[`
>>
>>     o   parse() and parse_Rd() miscounted columns when multibyte UTF-8
>>         characters were present.
>>
>>     o   Formatting of help pages has had minor improvements: extra
>>         blank lines have been removed from the text format, and empty
>>         package labels removed from HTML.
>>
>>     o   cor(A, B) where A has n x 1 and B a 1-dimensional array
>>         segfaulted or gave an internal error.
>>         (The case cor(B, A) was PR#7116.)
>>
>>     o   cut.POSIXt() applied to a start value after the DST transition
>>         on a DST-change day could give the wrong time for
'breaks' in units
>>         of days or longer.  (PR#14208)
>>
>>     o   do_par() UNPROTECTed too early (PR#14214)
>>
>>     o   subassignment x[[....]]<- y didn't check for a
zero-length
>>         right hand side, and inserted rubbish value. (PR#14217)
>>
>>     o   fisher.test() no longer gives a P-value *very* slightly>  1,
>>         in some borderline cases.
>>
>>     o   Internal function matchArgs no longer modifies the general
>>         purpose bits of the SEXPs that make up the formals list of R
>>         functions.  This fixes an invalid error message that would
>>         occur when a garbage collection triggered a second call to
>>         matchArgs for the same function via a finalizer.
>>
>>     o   gsub() in 2.10.x could fail from stack overflow for extremely
>>         long strings due to temporary data being allocated on the
>>         stack.  Also, gsub() with fixed=TRUE is in some circumstances
>>         considerably faster.
>>
>>     o   Several primitives, including attributes(), attr<-()
>>         interactive(), nargs() and proc.time(), did not check that
>>         they were called with the correct number of arguments.
>>
>>     o   A potential race condition in list.files() when other processes
>>         are operating on the directory has been fixed; the code now
>>         dynamically allocates memory for file listings in a single
>>         pass instead of making an initial count pass.
>>
>>     o   mean(x, trim=, na.rm = FALSE) failed to return NA if
'x'
>>         contained missing values.  (Reported by Bill Dunlap.)
>>
>>     o   Extreme tail behavior of, pbeta() {and hence pf()}, e.g.,
>>         pbeta(x, 3, 2200, lower.tail=FALSE, log.p=TRUE) now returns
>>         finite values instead of jumping to -Inf too early (PR#14230).
>>
>>     o   parse(text=x) misbehaved for objects 'x' that were not
coerced
>>         internally to character, notably symbols.  (Reported to
>>         R-devel by Bill Dunlap.)
>>
>>     o   The internal C function 'coerceSymbol' now handles
coercion to
>>         character, and warns if coercion fails (rather than silently
>>         returning NULL).  This allows a name to be given where a
>>         character vector is required in functions which coerce
>>         internally.
>>
>>     o   The interpretation by strptime() of %c was non-standard (not
>>         that it is ever advisable to use locale- and system-specific
>>         input formats).
>>
>>     o   capabilities("X11") now works the same way on Mac OS
X as on
>>         other platforms (and as documented: it was always true for R
>>         built with --with-aqua, as the CRAN builds are).
>>
>>     o   The X11() device with cairo but not Pango (notably Mac OS X)
>>         now checks validity of text strings in UTF-8 locales (since
>>         Pango does but cairo it seems does not).
>>
>>     o   read.fwf() misread multi-line records when n was specified.
>>         (PR#14241)
>>
>>     o   all.equal(*, tolerance = e) passes the numeric tolerance also
to
>>         the comparison of the attributes.
>>
>>     o   pgamma(0,0), a boundary case, now returns 0, its limit from the
>>         left, rather than the limit from the right.
>>
>>     o   Issuing POST requests to the internal web server could stall
>>         the request under certain circumstances.
>>
>>     o   gzcon(<textConnection>  ), an error, no longer damages
the
>>         connection (in a way to have it seg.fault). (PR#14237)
>>
>>     o   All the results from hist() now use the nominal
'breaks' not
>>         those adjusted by the numeric 'fuzz": in recent
versions the
>>         nominal 'breaks' were reported but the
'density' referred to
>>         the intervals used in the calculation -- which mattered very
>>         slightly for one of the extreme bins.  (Based on a report by
>>         Martin Becker.)
>>
>>     o   If xy[z].coords (used internally by many graphics functions)
are
>>         given a list as 'x', they now check that the list has
suitable
>>         names and give a more informative error message.  (PR#13936)
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Peter Dalgaard
>> Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
>> Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
>> Phone: (+45)38153501
>> Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> R-announce at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-announce
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>> PLEASE do read the posting guide
>> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>
>
>          [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
-- 
Dr Paul Murrell
Department of Statistics
The University of Auckland
Private Bag 92019
Auckland
New Zealand
64 9 3737599 x85392
paul at stat.auckland.ac.nz
http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~paul/