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A general description is here.
‘Sys.getenv(x, names, *)’ returns a ‘"DList"’, and hence prints tidily
when ‘x’ is missing and ‘names’ is not false.
When ‘x’ is missing and ‘names’ is not false, ‘Sys.getenv(x, names)’ returns an object of class ‘"DList"’ and hence prints tidily.
‘read.fwf()’ and ‘read.DIF()’ gain a ‘fileEncoding’ argument, for convenience.
Graphics devices can add attributes to their description in ‘.Device’ and ‘.Devices’. Several of those included with R use a ‘"filepath"’ attribute.
The Bioconductor ‘version’ used by ‘setRepositories()’ can now be set by environment variable ‘R_BIOC_VERSION’ at runtime, not just when R is installed. (It has been stated that Bioconductor will switch from ‘version’ 2.14 to ‘version’ 3.0 during the lifetime of the R 3.1 series.)
‘type.convert()’, ‘read.table()’ and similar ‘read.*()’ functions get a new ‘numerals’ argument, specifying how numeric input is converted when its conversion to double precision loses accuracy. The default ‘numerals = "allow.loss"’ allows accuracy loss, as in R versions before 3.1.0.
‘dbeta(., a,b)’, ‘pbeta()’, ‘qbeta()’ and ‘rbeta()’ are now defined also for a = 0, b = 0, or infinite a and b (where they typically returned ‘NaN’ before).
When ‘attach()’ reports conflicts, it does so compatibly with ‘library()’ using ‘message()’.
The ‘"CRAN"’ filter (see ‘available.packages()’) no longer removes duplicates other than of packages on CRAN, and does not fail if there is no CRAN repository in ‘getOption("repository")’.
(Windows.) Commands such as ‘Sys.which()’ and ‘pipe()’ which needed to find the full path to a command could segfault if the ‘long’ path name was much longer than the ‘short’ path name (which ‘Sys.which()’ returns), as the behaviour of the Windows API call had changed.