Rolf Turner wrote:
On 18/12/2008, at 11:34 AM, Richard E. Chandler wrote:
Dear R-help,
Like several other subscribers, I have recently encountered a problem
whereby R will execute code apparently correctly and without error,
but any subsequent command will yield "Error: bad value" so that R
has to be killed and restarted. We have checked this out with a few
different operating systems (Windows XP/Vista and Linux) and with
different versions of R. We have established the following:
1. The error occurs with versions of R from 2.5.0 onwards on all the
OSs we have tried, but not with earlier versions of R.
2. The error is not reproducable between machines - identical code
will fail at different points on two different machines.
3. The error is not related to contributed packages, because our code
doesn't use any. The code *does*, however, use repeated calls to
optim() and nlm(), and passes several arguments through a sequence of
functions using "...".
4. Occasionally, we get an error relating to subset replacement
instead of "Error:bad value". For example:
x <- rnorm(10)
x[1] <- 3
Error in x[1] <- 3 : could not find function "[<-"
5. The error behaviour changes as a result of minor modifications to
print() statements in the code e.g. by inserting a line that prints
the value of a well-defined variable.
I suspect this really *is* a bug (particularly since it only started
happening with version 2.5.0), but I figure it would be worth giving
people a chance to tell me I'm an idiot before reporting it as such.
In case anybody would like to try and see the error for themselves, I
have uploaded some files to
http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucakarc/Rtest/. The file ErrorDemo.r
is the main script - see the file header there for more details.
Files momfit.r and elmstats.dat are also required for this example to
work. I'm sorry that it isn't a very simple example, but I haven't
seen a simple illustration of the problem (and I couldn't find any
examples in the list archives either).
I can confirm that the error occurs.
I downloaded the files and sourced ``ErrorDemo.R''. Doing x <- rnorm(10)
after doing so triggered the error. Subsequently attempting traceback()
(or anything else) simply triggered the error again.
Good luck to R Core in tracking this down!
Unfortunately, there's at least on R Core member for which it does NOT
happen... Fedora 9 i686, R 2.8.0 and 2.8.1 RC (2008-12-15 r47214)
--
O__ ---- Peter Dalgaard Øster Farimagsgade 5, Entr.B
c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics PO Box 2099, 1014 Cph. K
(*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen Denmark Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalga...@biostat.ku.dk) FAX: (+45) 35327907
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