On 06/01/2011 4:45 PM, Sebastien Bihorel wrote:
Dear R-users,

Is there a way I can prevent global variables to be visible within my
functions?


Yes, but you probably shouldn't. You would do it by setting the environment of the function to something that doesn't have the global environment as a parent, or grandparent, etc. The only common examples of that are baseenv() and emptyenv(). For example,

x <- 1
f <- function() print(x)

Then f() will work, and print the 1.  But if I do

environment(f) <- baseenv()

then it won't work:

> f()
Error in print(x) : object 'x' not found

The problem with doing this is that it is not the way users expect functions to work, and it will probably have weird side effects. It is not the way things work in packages (even packages with namespaces will eventually search the global environment, the namespace just comes first). There's no simple way to do it and yet get access to functions in other packages besides base without explicitly specifying them (e.g. you'd need to use stats::lm(), not just lm(), etc.)

Duncan Murdoch

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