just going to throw this idea out there in case it's something that anyone wants to pursue: if i have an R script and i'm hitting some unexpected behavior, there should be some way to remove extraneous objects and manipulations that never touch the line that i'm trying to reproduce. automatically stepping through the code and removing things that never affect the final line seems (difficult but) possible. so if my_example.R looks like this code and i didn't understand why i was hitting an error at the third line..
x <- mtcars y <- mean( mtcars$mpg ) mean( x[ , "hello" ] ) ..the function i am envisioning would automatically remove the `y <- mean( mtcars$mpg )` because that object and all subsequent objects do not affect the error resulting from the third line. in other words, pointing this minimize() function to the error.. minimize( "my_example.R" , 'Error in `[.data.frame`(x, , "hello") : undefined columns selected' ) ..would find that the error happens on the third line, then follow things backward and remove any command that does not touch the line that results in the error. so my reproducible example was three lines, but the minimal reproducible example became two lines. i understand it might be impossible to automate all of the minimizing, but i think there might be enough low-hanging fruit here that this might be a quick and useful debugging tool for those of us trying to create easier-to-reproduce code for members of this list. thanks! [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see 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.