On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 2:27 PM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.dun...@gmail.com>wrote:
> On 12-12-10 7:33 PM, Worik R wrote:
>
>> Let me restate my question.
>>
>> Is there a straightforward way of ensuring I can use the variable name
>> USDCHF?
>>
>
> You can use any legal variable name. The only risk is that you will
> overwrite some other variable that you created. You can't overwrite
> variables from packages. (You might mask them, but they are still
> accessible using the :: notation. E.g. after you set
>
> USDCHF <- NULL
>
Exactly. I got around this by assigning NULL to the variable names that I
would have deleted. Then instead of testing for existence I tested for
NULL.
>
> you can still access the one in timeSeries using
>
> timeSeries::USDCHF
Christ. That is what I wanted to delete. I read the scoping section of
R-Lang (again) and nothing I could see prepared me for the shock of...
> library(timeSeries)
> nrow(USDCHF)
[1] 62496
> rm(USDCHF)
Warning message:
In rm(USDCHF) : object 'USDCHF' not found
> nrow(USDCHF)
[1] 62496
The message from rm was that USDCHF did not exist. But I can still access
its properties with nrow.
This is very broken. I would not have believed I would see that in the
21st century with a modern language. (Oh wait, there is Javascript and
PHP, so in comparison R is not that broken)
I am not new to R, I have been (mis)using it for 5 years. I love aspects
of R, but this and a few other things (lack of debugging support and
ignoring the "principle of least surprise" are two biggies) are very
frustrating. Without debugging support or more help from the compiler
(like a "cannot rm EURCHF" message instead of a lie) R causes as many
problems as it solves.
Sigh. Thanks for the help.
Worik
>
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