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A general description is here.
‘file.info(, extra_cols = FALSE)’ allows a minimal set of columns to be computed on Unix-alikes: on some systems without properly-configured caching this can be significantly faster with large file lists.
New function ‘dir.exists()’ in package ‘base’ to test efficiently whether one or more paths exist and are directories.
‘save()’, ‘saveRDS()’ and ‘serialize()’ now support ‘ascii = NA’ which writes ASCII files using ‘sprintf("%a")’) for double/complex quantities. This is read-compatible with ‘ascii = TRUE’ but avoids binary->decimal->binary conversions with potential loss of precision. Unfortunately the Windows C runtime's lack of C99 compliance means that the format cannot be read correctly there in R before 3.1.2.
‘crossprod(x, y)’ allows more matrix coercions when ‘x’ or ‘y’ are vectors, now equalling ‘t(x) %*% y’ in these cases (also reported by Radford Neal). Similarly, ‘tcrossprod(x,y)’ and ‘%*%’ work in more cases with vector arguments.
There is support for testing the ‘\dontrun’ and ‘\donttest’ parts of examples in packages.
‘tools::testInstalledPackage()’ accepts new arguments ‘commentDontrun = FALSE’ and ‘commentDonttest = FALSE’.
‘R CMD check’ gains options ‘--run-dontrun’ and ‘--run-donttest’.
‘R CMD check’ now by default checks code usage directly on the package namespace without loading and attaching the package and its suggests and enhances. For good practice with packages in the ‘Suggests’ field, see §1.1.3.1 of ‘Writing R Extensions’.
The HTML generated by ‘tools::Rd2HTML()’ and ‘tools::toHTML()’ methods is now ‘XHTML 1.0 Strict’.