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A general description is here.
‘configure’ option ‘--with-internal-tzcode’ can now be used with variable ‘rsharedir’.
‘type.convert()’ (and hence by default ‘read.table()’) returns a character vector or factor when representing a numeric input as a double would lose accuracy. Similarly for complex inputs.
If a file contains numeric data with unrepresentable numbers of decimal places that are intended to be read as numeric, specify ‘colClasses’ in ‘read.table()’ to be ‘"numeric"’.
Avoid duplicating the right hand side values in complex assignments when possible. This reduces copying of replacement values in expressions such as ‘Z$a <- a0’ and ‘ans[[i]] <- tmp’: some package code has relied on there being copies.
Also, a number of other changes to reduce copying of objects; all contributed by or based on suggestions by Michael Lawrence.
‘mcparallel()’ gains an option ‘detach = TRUE’ which allows execution of code independently of the current session. It is based on a new ‘estranged = TRUE’ argument to ‘mcfork()’ which forks child processes such that they become independent of the parent process.
The ‘pdf()’ device omits circles and text at extremely small sizes, since some viewers were failing on such files.
The ‘summary()’ method for ‘"lm"’ fits warns if the fit is essentially perfect, as most of the summary may be computed inaccurately (and with platform-dependent values).
Programmers who use ‘summary()’ in order to extract just a component which will be reliable (e.g. ‘$cov.unscaled’) should wrap their calls in ‘suppressWarnings()’.
The included (64-bit) time-zone conversion code and Olson time-zone database can be used instead of the system version: use ‘configure’ option ‘--with-internal-tzcode’. This is the default on Windows and OS X. (Note that this does not currently work if a non-default ‘rsharedir’ ‘configure’ variable is used.)
(It might be necessary to set environment variable ‘TZ’ on OSes where this is not already set, although the system timezone is deduced correctly on at least Linux, OS X and Windows.)
This option also switches to the version of ‘strftime’ included in directory ‘src/extra/tzone’.
In the ‘DESCRIPTION’ file,
License: X11
is no longer recognized as valid. Use ‘MIT’ or ‘BSD_2_clause’ instead, both of which need ‘+ file LICENSE’.