• The default version of Bioconductor has been changed to 3.14. (This is used by ‘setRepositories’ and the menus in GUIs.)

CHANGES IN R 4.1.3 UTILITIES

• ‘R CMD check --as-cran’ has a workaround for a bug in versions of ‘file’ up to at least 5.41 which mis-identify DBF files last changed in 2022 as executables.

CHANGES IN R 4.1.3 C-LEVEL FACILITIES

• The legacy S-compatibility macros ‘SINGLE_*’ in ‘R_ext/Constants.h’ (included by ‘R.h’) are deprecated and will be removed in R 4.2.0.

CHANGES IN R 4.1.3 BUG FIXES

• Initialization of self-starting ‘nls()’ models with initialization functions following the pre-R-4.1.0 API (without the ‘...’ argument) works again for now, with a deprecation warning.

• Fixed quoting of ‘~autodetect~’ in Java setting defaults to avoid inadvertent user lookup due to leading ‘~’, reported in PR#18231 by Harold Gutch.

• ‘substr(., start, stop) <- v’ now treats _negative_ ‘stop’ values correctly. Reported with a patch in PR#18228 by Brodie Gaslam.

• Subscripting an array ‘x’ without dimnames by a ‘length(dim(x))’-column character matrix gave "random" non-sense, now an error; reported in PR#18244 by Mikael Jagan.

• ‘...names()’ now matches ‘names(list(...))’ closely, fixing PR#18247.

• ‘all.equal(*, scale = s)’ now works as intended when ‘length(s) > 1’, partly thanks to Michael Chirico's PR#18272.

• ‘print(x)’ for long vectors ‘x’ now also works for named atomic vectors or lists and prints the correct number when reaching the ‘getOption("max.print")’ limit; partly thanks to a report and proposal by Hugh Parsonage to the R-devel list.

• ‘all.equal(<selfStart>, *)’ no longer signals a deprecation warning.

• ‘reformulate(*, response=r)’ gives a helpful error message now when ‘length(r) > 1’, thanks to Bill Dunlap's PR#18281.

• Modifying ‘globalCallingHandlers’ inside ‘withCallingHandlers()’ now works or fails correctly, thanks to Henrik Bengtsson's PR#18257.

• ‘hist(<Date>, breaks = "days")’ and ‘hist(<POSIXt>, breaks = "secs")’ no longer fail for inputs of length 1.

• ‘qbeta(.001, .9, .009)’ and similar cases now converge correctly thanks to Ben Bolker's report in PR#17746.

• ‘window(x, start, end)’ no longer wrongly signals “'start' cannot be after 'end'”, fixing PR#17527 and PR#18291.

• ‘data()’ now checks that its (rarely used) ‘list’ argument is a character vector - a couple of packages passed other types and gave incorrect results.

• ‘which()’ now checks its ‘arr.ind’ argument is TRUE rather coercing to logical and taking the first element - which gave incorrect results in package code.

• ‘model.weights()’ and ‘model.offset()’ more carefully extract their model components, thanks to Ben Bolker and Tim Taylor's R-devel post.

• ‘list.files(recursive = TRUE)’ now shows all broken symlinks (previously, some of them may have been omitted, PR#18296).

• ‘R CMD check --as-cran’ has a workaround for a bug in versions of ‘file’ up to at least 5.41 which mis-identify DBF files last changed in 2022 as executables.

• ‘model.weights()’ and ‘model.offset()’ more carefully extract their model components, thanks to Ben Bolker and Tim Taylor's R-devel post.

• ‘list.files(recursive = TRUE)’ now shows all broken symlinks (previously, some of them may have been omitted, PR#18296).

• ‘window(x, start, end)’ no longer wrongly signals “'start' cannot be after 'end'”, fixing PR#17527 and PR#18291.

• ‘qbeta(.001, .9, .009)’ and similar cases now converge correctly thanks to Ben Bolker's report in PR#17746.

• ‘data()’ now checks that its (rarely used) ‘list’ argument is a character vector - a couple of packages passed other types and gave incorrect results.

• ‘which()’ now checks its ‘arr.ind’ argument is TRUE rather coercing to logical and taking the first element - which gave incorrect results in package code.

CHANGES IN R 4.0.0 NEW FEATURES

• ‘deparse(..)’, ‘dump(..)’, and ‘dput(x, control = "all")’ now include control option ‘"digits17"’ which typically ensures 1:1 invertibility. New option ‘control = "exact"’ ensures numeric exact invertibility via ‘"hexNumeric"’.

• Modifying ‘globalCallingHandlers’ inside ‘withCallingHandlers()’ now works or fails correctly, thanks to Henrik Bengtsson's PR#18257.

• ‘hist(<Date>, breaks = "days")’ and ‘hist(<POSIXt>, breaks = "secs")’ no longer fail for inputs of length 1.

• ‘reformulate(*, response=r)’ gives a helpful error message now when ‘length(r) > 1’, thanks to Bill Dunlap's PR#18281.

• ‘formulate(*, response=r)’ gives a helpful error message now when ‘length(r) > 1’, thanks to Bill Dunlap's PR#18281.

• The legacy S-compatibility macros ‘SINGLE_*’ in ‘R_ext/Constants.h’ (included by ‘R.h’) are deprecated and will be removed in R 4.2.0.

• ‘all.equal(<selfStart>, *)’ no longer signals a deprecation warning.

• The legacy S-compatibility macros ‘SINGLE_*’ in ‘R_ext/Constants.h’ (included by ‘R.h’) are deprecated and will be removed in due course.

• ‘all.equal(*, scale = s)’ now works as intended when ‘length(s) > 1’, partly thanks to Michael Chirico's PR#18272.

• ‘print(x)’ for long vectors ‘x’ now also works for named atomic vectors or lists and prints the correct number when reaching the ‘getOption("max.print")’ limit; partly thanks to a report and proposal by Hugh Parsonage to the R-devel list.

• ‘...names()’ now matches ‘names(list(...))’ closely, fixing PR#18247.

• Subscripting an array ‘x’ without dimnames by a ‘length(dim(x))’-column character matrix gave "random" non-sense, now an error; reported in PR#18244 by Mikael Jagan.

• Initialization of self-starting ‘nls()’ models with initialization functions following the pre-R-4.1.0 API (without the ‘...’ argument) works again for now, with a deprecation warning.

• ‘substr(., start, stop) <- v’ now treats _negative_ ‘stop’ values correctly. Reported with a patch in PR#18228 by Brodie Gaslam.

• Fixed quoting of ‘~autodetect~’ in Java setting defaults to avoid inadvertent user lookup due to leading ‘~’, reported in PR#18231 by Harold Gutch.

• The default version of Bioconductor has been changed to 3.14. (This is used by ‘setRepositories’ and the menus in GUIs.)

• Initialization of self-starting models with pre-R-4.1.0 API initialization functions (missing the ‘...’ argument) for now works again, with a deprecation warning.

• The workaround in headers ‘R.h’ and ‘Rmath.h’ (‘using namespace std;’) for the Oracle Developer Studio compiler is no longer needed now C++11 is required so has been removed. A couple more usages of ‘log()’ (which should have been ‘std::log()’) with an ‘int’ argument are reported on Solaris.

• The undocumented limit of 4095 bytes on messages from the S-compatibility macros ‘PROBLEM’ and ‘MESSAGE’ is now documented and longer messages will be silently truncated rather than potentially causing segfaults.

• If the ‘R_NO_SEGV_HANDLER’ environment variable is non-empty, the signal handler for SEGV/ILL/BUS signals (which offers recovery user interface) is not set. This allows more reliable debugging of crashes that involve the console.

CHANGES IN R 4.1.2 DEPRECATED AND DEFUNCT

• The legacy S-compatibility macros ‘PROBLEM’, ‘MESSAGE’, ‘ERROR’, ‘WARN’, ‘WARNING’, ‘RECOVER’, ... are deprecated and will be hidden in R 4.2.0. R's native interface of ‘Rf_error’ and ‘Rf_warning’ has long been preferred.

CHANGES IN R 4.1.2 BUG FIXES

• ‘.mapply(F, dots, .)’ no longer segfaults when ‘dots’ is not a ‘list’ and uses ‘match.fun(F)’ as always documented; reported by Andrew Simmons in PR#18164.

• ‘hist(<Date>, ...)’ and ‘hist(<POSIXt>, ...)’ no longer pass arguments for ‘rect()’ (such as ‘col’ and ‘density’) to ‘axis()’. (Thanks to Sebastian Meyer's PR#18171.)

• \Sexpr{ch} now preserves ‘Encoding(ch)’. (Thanks to report and patch by Jeroen Ooms in PR#18152.)

• Setting the RNG to ‘"Marsaglia-Multicarry"’ e.g., by ‘RNGkind()’, now warns in more places, thanks to André Gillibert's report and patch in PR#18168.

• ‘gray(numeric(), alpha=1/2)’ no longer segfaults, fixing PR#18183, reported by Till Krenz.

• Fixed ‘dnbinom(x, size=<very_small>, .., log=TRUE)’ regression, reported by Martin Morgan.

• ‘as.Date.POSIXlt(x)’ now keeps ‘names(x)’, thanks to Davis Vaughan's report and patch in PR#18188.

• ‘model.response()’ now strips an ‘"AsIs"’ class typically, thanks to Duncan Murdoch's report and other discussants in PR#18190.

• ‘try()’ is considerably faster in case of an error and long call, as e.g., from some ‘do.call()’. Thanks to Alexander Kaever's suggestion posted to R-devel.

• ‘qqline(y = <object>)’ such as ‘y=I(.)’, now works, see also PR#18190.

• Non-integer ‘mgp’ ‘par()’ settings are now handled correctly in ‘axis()’ and ‘mtext()’, thanks to Mikael Jagan and Duncan Murdoch's report and suggestion in PR#18194.

• ‘formatC(x)’ returns length zero ‘character()’ now, rather than ‘""’ when ‘x’ is of length zero, as documented, thanks to Davis Vaughan's post to R-devel.

• ‘removeSource(fn)’ now retains (other) ‘attributes(fn)’.

• ‘removeSource(fn)’ now retains (other) ‘attributes(fn)’.

• If the ‘R_NO_SEGV_HANDLER’ environment variable is non-empty, the signal handler for SEGV/ILL/BUS signals (which offers recovery user interface) is not set. This allows more reliable debugging of crashes that involve the console.

CHANGES IN R 4.1.1 patched BUG FIXES

• ‘qqline(y = <object>)’ such as ‘y=I(.)’, now works, see also PR#18190.

• Non-integer ‘mgp’ ‘par()’ settings are now handled correctly in ‘axis()’ and ‘mtext()’, thanks to Mikael Jagan and Duncan Murdoch's report and suggestion in PR#18194.

• ‘formatC(x)’ returns length zero ‘character()’ now, rather than ‘""’ when ‘x’ is of length zero, as documented, thanks to Davis Vaughan's post to R-devel.

CHANGES IN R 4.1.0 NEW FEATURES

• ‘names()’ now works for ‘DOTSXP’ objects. On the other hand, in ‘R-lang’, the R language manual, we now warn against relying on the structure or even existence of such dot-dot-dot objects.

CHANGES IN R 4.1.0 BUG FIXES

• Message translation domains, e.g., for errors and warnings, are now correctly determined also when e.g., a ‘base’ function is called from “top-level” function (i.e., defined in ‘globalenv()’), thanks to a patch from Joris Goosen fixing PR#17998.

CHANGES IN R 4.0.4 BUG FIXES

• Message translation domains, e.g., for errors and warnings, are now correctly determined also when e.g., a ‘base’ function is called from “top-level” function (i.e., defined in ‘globalenv()’), thanks to a patch from Joris Goosen fixing PR#17998.

CHANGES IN R 4.0.0 DEPRECATED AND DEFUNCT

• Defunct functions ‘mem.limits()’, ‘.readRDS()’, ‘.saveRDS()’, ‘.find.package()’, and ‘.path.package()’ from package ‘base’ and ‘allGenerics()’, ‘getAccess()’, ‘getAllMethods()’, ‘getClassName()’, ‘getClassPackage()’, ‘getExtends()’, ‘getProperties()’, ‘getPrototype()’, ‘getSubclasses()’, ‘getVirtual()’, ‘mlistMetaName()’, ‘removeMethodsObject()’, ‘seemsS4Object()’, ‘traceOff()’, and ‘traceOn()’ from ‘methods’ have been removed.

• ‘try()’ is considerably faster in case of an error and long call, as e.g., from some ‘do.call()’. Thanks to Alexander Kaever's suggestion posted to R-devel.

• ‘model.response()’ now strips an ‘"AsIs"’ class typically, thanks to Duncan Murdoch's report and other discussants in PR#18190.

• ‘as.Date.POSIXlt(x)’ now keeps ‘names(x)’, thanks to Davis Vaughan's report and patch in PR#18188.

• Fixed ‘dnbinom(x, size=<very_small>, .., log=TRUE)’ regression, reported by Martin Morgan.

• \Sexpr{ch} now preserves ‘Encoding(ch)’. (Thanks to report and patch by Jeroen Ooms in PR#18152.)

• Setting the RNG to ‘"Marsaglia-Multicarry"’ e.g., by ‘RNGkind()’, now warns in more places, thanks to André Gillibert's report and patch in PR#18168.

• ‘gray(numeric(), alpha=1/2)’ no longer segfaults, fixing PR#18183, reported by Till Krenz.

• ‘anova.glm()’ and ‘anova.glmlist()’ computed incorrect score (Rao) tests in no-intercept cases. (André Gillibert, PR#17735)

• The workaround in headers ‘R.h’ and ‘Rmath.h’ (‘using namespace std;’) for the Oracle Developer Studio compiler is no longer needed now C++11 is required so has been removed. A couple more usages of ‘log()’ (which should have been ‘std::log()’) with an ‘int’ argument are reported on Solaris.

CHANGES IN R 4.1.1 patched BUG FIXES

• ‘hist(<Date>, ...)’ and ‘hist(<POSIXt>, ...)’ no longer pass arguments for ‘rect()’ (such as ‘col’ and ‘density’) to ‘axis()’. (Thanks to Sebastian Meyer's PR#18171.)

• The workaround in headers ‘R.h’ and ‘Rmath.h’ (‘using namespace std;’) for the Oracle Developer Studio compiler is no longer needed now C++11 is required so has been removed. A few more usages of ‘log’ with an integer argument are reported on Solaris.

• The undocumented limit of 4095 bytes on messages from the S-compatibility macros ‘PROBLEM’ and ‘MESSAGE’ is now documented and longer messages will be silently truncated rather than potentially causing segfaults.

• The workaround in headers ‘R.h’ and ‘Rmath.h’ (‘use namespace std:’) for the Oracle Developer Studio compiler is no longer needed now C++11 is required so has been removed. A few more usages of ‘log’ with an integer argument are reported on Solaris.

CHANGES IN R 4.1.0 NEW FEATURES

• ‘type.convert()’ now warns when its ‘as.is’ argument is not specified, as the help file always said it _should_. In that case, the default is changed to ‘TRUE’ in line with its change in ‘read.table()’ (related to ‘stringsAsFactors’) in R 4.0.0.

CHANGES IN R 4.1.0 BUG FIXES

• ‘str()’ now works correctly for ‘DOTSXP’ and related exotics, even when these are doomed.

  Additionally, it no longer fails for ‘list’s with a ‘class’ and “irregular” method definitions such that e.g. ‘lapply(*)’ will necessarily fail, as currently for different ‘igraph’ objects.

• Too long lines in environment files (e.g., ‘Renviron’) no longer crash R. This limit has been increased to 100,000 bytes. (PR#18001.)

• The legacy S-compatibility macros ‘PROBLEM’, ‘MESSAGE’, ‘ERROR’, ‘WARN’, ‘WARNING’, ‘RECOVER’, ... are deprecated and will be hidden in R 4.2.0. R's native interface of ‘Rf_error’ and ‘Rf_warning’ has long been preferred.

CHANGES IN R 4.1.0 NEW FEATURES

• New palettes ‘"Rocket"’ and ‘"Mako"’ for ‘hcl.colors()’ (approximating palettes of the same name from the ‘viridisLite’ package).

  Contributed by Achim Zeileis.

• ‘.mapply(F, dots, .)’ no longer segfaults when ‘dots’ is not a ‘list’ and uses ‘match.fun(F)’ as always documented; reported by Andrew Simmons in PR#18164.

• ‘hist(<Date>, ...)’ and ‘hist(<POSIXt>, ...)’ no longer pass arguments for ‘rect()’, such as ‘col’ and ‘density’, to ‘axis()’. (Thanks to Sebastian Meyer's PR#18171.)

• The workaround in headers ‘R.h’ and ‘Rmath.h’ (‘use namespace std:’) for the Oracle Developer Studio compiler is no longer needed now C++11 is required so has been removed.

• ‘dnbinom(20, <large>, 1)’ now correctly gives 0, and similar cases are more accurate with underflow precaution. (Reported by Francisco Vera Alcivar in PR#18072.)

• ‘require(pkg, quietly = TRUE)’ is quieter and in particular does not warn if the package is not found.

CHANGES IN R 4.1.1 DEPRECATED AND DEFUNCT

• Use of ‘ftp://’ URIs should be regarded as deprecated, with on-going support confined to ‘method = "libcurl"’ and not routinely tested. (Nowadays no major browser supports them.)

• The non-default ‘method = "internal"’ is deprecated for ‘http://’ and ‘ftp://’ URIs for both ‘download.file’ and ‘url’.

• On Windows, ‘method = "wininet"’ is deprecated for ‘http://’, ‘https://’ and ‘ftp://’ URIs for both ‘download.file’ and ‘url’. (A warning is only given for ‘ftp://’.)

  For ‘ftp://’ URIs the default method is now ‘"libcurl"’ if available (which it is on CRAN builds).

  ‘method = "wininet"’ remains the default for ‘http://’ and ‘https://’ URIs but if ‘libcurl’ is available, using ‘method = "libcurl"’ is preferred.

CHANGES IN R 4.1.1 INSTALLATION

• ‘make check’ now works also without a LaTeX installation. (Thanks to Sebastian Meyer's PR#18103.)

CHANGES IN R 4.1.1 BUG FIXES

• ‘make check-devel’ works again in an R build configured with ‘--without-recommended-packages’.

• ‘qnbinom(p, size, mu)’ for large ‘size/mu’ is correct now in a range of cases (PR#18095); similarly for the ‘(size, prob)’ parametrization of the negative binomial. Also ‘qpois()’ and ‘qbinom()’ are better and or faster for extreme cases. The underlying C code has been modularized and is common to all four cases of discrete distributions.

• ‘gap.axis’ is now part of the ‘axis()’ arguments which are passed from ‘bxp()’, and hence ‘boxplot()’. (Thanks to Martin Smith's report and suggestions in PR#18109.)

• ‘.First’ and ‘.Last’ can again be set from the site profile.

• ‘seq.int(from, to, *)’ and ‘seq.default(..)’ now work better in large range cases where ‘from-to’ is infinite where the two boundaries are finite.

• ‘all.equal(x,y)’ now returns ‘TRUE’ correctly also when several entries of ‘abs(x)’ and ‘abs(y)’ are close to ‘.Machine$double.xmax’, the largest finite ‘numeric’.

• ‘model.frame()’ now clears the object bit when removing the ‘class’ attribute of a value via ‘na.action’ (PR#18100).

• ‘charClass()’ now works with multi-character strings on Windows (PR#18104, fixed by Bill Dunlap).

• ‘encodeString()’ on Solaris now works again in Latin-1 encoding on characters represented differently in UTF-8. Support for surrogate pairs on Solaris has been improved.

• ‘file.show()’ on Windows now works with non-ASCII path names representable in the current native encoding (PR#18132).

• Embedded R on Windows can now find R home directory via the registry even when installed only for the current user (PR#18135).

• ‘pretty(x)’ with finite ‘x’ now returns finite values also in the case where the extreme ‘x’ values are close in size to the maximal representable number ‘.Machine$double.xmax’.

  Also, it's been tweaked for very small ranges and when a boundary is close (or equal) to zero; e.g., ‘pretty(c(0,1e-317))’ no longer has negative numbers, currently still warning about a very small range, and ‘pretty(2^-(1024 - 2^-1/(c(24,10))))’ is more accurate.

• The error message for not finding vignette files when weaving has correct file sizes now. (Thanks to Sebastian Meyer's PR#18154.)

• The error message for not finding vignette files when weaving has correct file sizes now. (Thanks to Sebastian Meyer's PR#18154.)

• ‘pretty(x)’ with finite ‘x’ now returns finite values also in the case where the extreme ‘x’ values are close in size to the maximal representable number ‘.Machine$double.xmax’.

  Also, it's been tweaked for very small ranges and when a boundary is close (or equal) to zero; e.g., ‘pretty(c(0,1e-317))’ no longer has negative numbers, currently still warning about a very small range, and ‘pretty(2^-(1024 - 2^-1/(c(24,10))))’ is more accurate.

CHANGES IN R 4.1.0 NEW FEATURES

• New function ‘gregexec()’ which generalizes ‘regexec()’ to find _all_ disjoint matches and all substrings corresponding to parenthesized subexpressions of the given regular expression. (Contributed by Brodie Gaslam.)

• ‘pretty(x)’ with finite ‘x’ now returns finite values also in the case where the extreme ‘x’ values are close in size to the maximal representable number ‘.Machine$double.xmax’.

• ‘model.frame()’ now clears the object bit when removing the ‘class’ attribute of a value via ‘na.action’ (PR#18100).

• ‘charClass()’ now works with multi-character strings on Windows (PR#18104, fixed by Bill Dunlap).

• ‘encodeString()’ on Solaris now works again in Latin-1 encoding on characters represented differently in UTF-8. Support for surrogate pairs on Solaris has been improved.

• ‘file.show()’ on Windows now works with non-ASCII path names representable in the current native encoding (PR#18132).

• Embedded R on Windows can now find R home directory via the registry even when installed only for the current user (PR#18135).

• ‘seq.int(from, to, *)’ and ‘seq.default(..)’ now work better in large range cases where ‘from-to’ is infinite where the two boundaries are finite.

• ‘all.equal(x,y)’ now returns ‘TRUE’ correctly also when several entries of ‘abs(x)’ and ‘abs(y)’ are close to ‘.Machine$double.xmax’, the largest finite ‘numeric’.

• ‘make check’ now works also without a LaTeX installation. (Thanks to Sebastian Meyer's PR#18103.)

CHANGES IN R 4.1.0 patched BUG FIXES

• ‘gap.axis’ is now part of the ‘axis()’ arguments which are passed from ‘bxp()’, and hence ‘boxplot()’. (Thanks to Martin Smith's report and suggestions in PR#18109.)

• ‘.First’ and ‘.Last’ can again be set from the site profile.

• ‘make check’ now works also without a LaTeX installation. (Thanks to Sebastian Meyer's PR#18103.)

• On Windows, ‘method = "wininet"’ is deprecated for ‘http://’, ‘https://’ and ‘ftp://’ URIs for both ‘download.file’ and ‘url’. (A warning is only given for ‘ftp://’.)

  For ‘ftp://’ URIs the default method is now ‘"libcurl"’ if available (which it is on CRAN builds).

  ‘method = "wininet"’ remains the default for ‘http://’ and ‘https://’ URIs but if ‘libcurl’ is available, using ‘method = "libcurl"’ is preferred.

CHANGES IN R 4.1.0 patched BUG FIXES

• ‘qnbinom(p, size, mu)’ for large ‘size/mu’ is correct now in a range of cases (PR#18095); similarly for the ‘(size, prob)’ parametrization of the negative binomial. Also ‘qpois()’ and ‘qbinom()’ are better and or faster for extreme cases. The underlying C code has been modularized and is common to all four cases of discrete distributions.

• The non-default ‘method = "internal"’ is deprecated for ‘http://’ and ‘ftp://’ URIs for both ‘download.file’ and ‘url’.

• On Windows, ‘method = "wininet"’ is deprecated for ‘http://’, ‘https://’ and ‘ftp://’ URIs for both ‘download.file’ and ‘url’.

  For ‘ftp://’ URIs the default method is now ‘"libcurl"’ if available (which it is on CRAN builds).

  ‘method = "wininet"’ remains the default for ‘http://’ and ‘https://’ URIs but if ‘libcurl’ is available, using ‘method = "libcurl"’ is preferred.

CHANGES IN R 4.1.0 ENCODING-RELATED CHANGES

• The character-classification functions used (by default) to replace the system ‘iswxxxxx’ functions on Windows, macOS and AIX have been updated to Unicode 13.0.0.

  The character-width tables have been updated to include new assignments in Unicode 13.0.0. This included treating all control characters as having zero width.

• On Windows, ‘download.file(method = "wininet") ’is deprecated for ‘ftp://’ URIs and will be removed in R 4.2.0. It remains the default but if ‘libcurl’ is available, use ‘method = "libcurl"’.

• Use of ‘ftp://’ URIs should be regarded as deprecated, with on-going support confined to ‘method = "libcurl"’ and not routinely tested. (Nowadays no major browser supports them.)

• ‘require(pkg, quietly = TRUE)’ is quieter and in particular does not warn if the package is not found.

CHANGES IN R 4.1.0 patched DEPRECATED AND DEFUNCT

• Using the non-default ‘method = "internal"’ for ‘http://’ and ‘ftp://’ URIs is deprecated for ‘download.file’ and ‘url’.

• On Windows download.file(method = "internal") is deprecated for ‘ftp://’ URIs and will be removed in R 4.2.0. It remains the default but if ‘libcurl’ is available, use ‘method = "libcurl"’.

• Use of ‘ftp://’ URIs should be regarded as deprecated, with on-going support confined to ‘method = "libcurl"’ and not routinely tested.

CHANGES IN R 4.1.0 patched BUG FIXES

• ‘make check-devel’ works again in an R build configured with ‘--without-recommended-packages’.

• ‘checkRdContents()’ is now exported from ‘tools’; it and also ‘checkDocFiles()’ have a new option ‘chkInternal’ allowing to check Rd files marked with keyword ‘"internal"’ as well. The latter can be activated for ‘R CMD check’ via environment variable ‘_R_CHECK_RD_INTERNAL_TOO_’.

• R now provides a shorthand notation for creating functions, e.g. ‘\(x) x + 1’ is parsed as ‘function(x) x + 1’.

• R now provides a simple native forward pipe syntax ‘|>’. The simple form of the forward pipe inserts the left-hand side as the first argument in the right-hand side call. The pipe implementation as a syntax transformation was motivated by suggestions from Jim Hester and Lionel Henry.

• ‘duplicated()’ and ‘anyDuplicated()’ are now optimized for integer and real vectors that are known to be sorted via the ALTREP framework. Contributed by Gabriel Becker via PR#17993.

• ‘R CMD check’ now runs sanity checks on the use of ‘LazyData’, for example that a ‘data’ directory is present and that ‘LazyDataCompression’ is not specified without ‘LazyData’ and has a documented value. For packages with large LazyData databases without specifying ‘LazyDataCompression’, there is a reference to the code given in ‘Writing R Extensions’ §1.1.6 to test the choice of compression (as in all the CRAN packages tested a non-default method was preferred).

• It is planned that the 4.1.x series will be the last to support 32-bit Windows, with production of binary packages for that series continuing until early 2023.

CHANGES IN R 4.1.0 SIGNIFICANT USER-VISIBLE CHANGES

• Data set ‘esoph’ in package ‘datasets’ now provides the correct numbers of controls; previously it had the numbers of cases added to these. (Reported by Alexander Fowler in PR#17964.)

CHANGES IN R 4.1.0 NEW FEATURES

• ‘www.omegahat.net’ is no longer one of the repositories known by default to ‘setRepositories()’. (Nowadays it only provides source packages and is often unavailable.)

• Function ‘package_dependencies()’ (in package ‘tools’) can now use different dependency types for direct and recursive dependencies.

• The checking of the size of tarball in ‘R CMD check --as-cran <pkg>’ may be tweaked via the new environment variable ‘_R_CHECK_CRAN_INCOMING_TARBALL_THRESHOLD_’, as suggested in PR#17777 by Jan Gorecki.

• Using ‘c()’ to combine a factor with other factors now gives a factor, an ordered factor when combining ordered factors with identical levels.

• ‘apply()’ gains a ‘simplify’ argument to allow disabling of simplification of results.

• The ‘format()’ method for class ‘"ftable"’ gets a new option ‘justify’. (Suggested by Thomas Soeiro.)

• New ‘...names()’ utility. (Proposed by Neal Fultz in PR#17705.)

• ‘type.convert()’ now warns when its ‘as.is’ argument is not specified, as the help file always said it _should_. In that case, the default is changed to ‘TRUE’ in line with its change in ‘read.table()’ (related to ‘stringsAsFactor’) in R 4.0.0.

• When printing list arrays, classed objects are now shown _via_ their ‘format()’ value if this is a short enough character string, or by giving the first elements of their class vector and their length.

• ‘capabilities()’ gets new entry ‘"Rprof"’ which is ‘TRUE’ when R has been configured with the equivalent of ‘--enable-R-profiling’ (as it is by default). (Related to Michael Orlitzky's report PR#17836.)

• ‘str(xS4)’ now also shows extraneous attributes of an S4 object ‘xS4’.

• Rudimentary support for vi-style tags in ‘rtags()’ and ‘R CMD rtags’ has been added. (Based on a patch from Neal Fultz in PR#17214.)

• ‘checkRdContents()’ is now exported from ‘tools’; it and also ‘checkDocFiles()’ have a new option ‘chkInternal’ allowing to check Rd files marked with keyword ‘"internal"’ as well. The latter can be activated for ‘R CMD check’ via experimental environment variable ‘_R_CHECK_RD_INTERNAL_TOO_’.

• New functions ‘numToBits()’ and ‘numToInts()’ extend the ‘raw’ conversion utilities to (double precision) ‘numeric’.

• Functions ‘URLencode()’ and ‘URLdecode()’ in package ‘utils’ now work on vectors of URIs. (Based on patch from Bob Rudis submitted with PR#17873.)

• ‘path.expand()’ can expand ‘~user’ on most Unix-alikes even when ‘readline’ is not in use. It tries harder to expand ‘~’, for example should environment variable ‘HOME’ be unset.

• For HTML help (both dynamic and static), Rd file links to help pages in external packages are now treated as references to topics rather than file names, and fall back to a file link only if the topic is not found in the target package. The earlier rule which prioritized file names over topics can be restored by setting the environment variable ‘_R_HELP_LINKS_TO_TOPICS_’ to a false value.

• ‘c()’ now removes ‘NULL’ arguments before dispatching to methods, thus simplifying the implementation of ‘c()’ methods, _but_ for back compatibility keeps ‘NULL’ when it is the first argument. (From a report and patch proposal by Lionel Henry in PR#17900.)

• ‘Vectorize()’'s result function's environment no longer keeps unneeded objects.

• Function ‘...elt()’ now propagates visibility consistently with ‘..n’. (Thanks to Lionel Henry's PR#17905.)

• ‘capture.output()’ no longer uses non-standard evaluation to evaluate its arguments. This makes evaluation of functions like ‘parent.frame()’ more consistent. (Thanks to Lionel Henry's PR#17907.)

• ‘packBits(bits, type="double")’ now works as inverse of ‘numToBits()’. (Thanks to Bill Dunlap's proposal in PR#17914.)

• ‘curlGetHeaders()’ has two new arguments, ‘timeout’ to specify the timeout for that call (overriding ‘getOption("timeout")’) and ‘TLS’ to specify the minimum TLS protocol version to be used for ‘https://’ URIs (_inter alia_ providing a means to check for sites using deprecated TLS versions 1.0 and 1.1).

• For ‘nls()’, an optional constant ‘scaleOffset’ may be added to the denominator of the relative offset convergence test for cases where the fit of a model is expected to be exact, thanks to a proposal by John Nash. ‘nls(*, trace=TRUE)’ now also shows the convergence criterion.

• Numeric differentiation _via_ ‘numericDeriv()’ gets new optional arguments ‘eps’ and ‘central’, the latter for taking central divided differences. The latter can be activated for ‘nls()’ via ‘nls.control(nDcentral = TRUE)’.

• ‘nls()’ now passes the ‘trace’ and ‘control’ arguments to ‘getInitial()’, notably for all self-starting models, so these can also be fit in zero-noise situations via a ‘scaleOffset’. For this reason, the ‘initial’ function of a ‘selfStart’ model must now have ‘...’ in its argument list.

• ‘bquote(splice = TRUE)’ can now splice expression vectors with attributes: this makes it possible to splice the result of ‘parse(keep.source = TRUE)’. (Report and patch provided by Lionel Henry in PR#17869.)

• ‘textConnection()’ gets an optional ‘name’ argument.

• ‘get()’, ‘exists()’, and ‘get0()’ now signal an error if the first argument has length greater than 1. Previously additional elements were silently ignored. (Suggested by Antoine Fabri on R-devel.)

• R now provides a shorthand notation for creating functions, e.g. ‘\(x) x + 1’ is parsed as ‘function(x) x + 1’. This feature is experimental and may change prior to release.

• R now provides a simple native forward pipe syntax ‘|>’. The simple form of the forward pipe inserts the left-hand side as the first argument in the right-hand side call. The pipe implementation as a syntax transformation was motivated by suggestions from Jim Hester and Lionel Henry. This feature is experimental and may change prior to release.

• ‘all.equal(f, g)’ for ‘function’s now by default also compares their ‘environment(.)’s, notably via new ‘all.equal’ method for class ‘function’. Comparison of ‘nls()’ fits, e.g., may now need ‘all.equal(m1, m2, check.environment = FALSE)’.

• ‘.libPaths()’ gets a new option ‘include.site’, allowing to _not_ include the site library. (Thanks to Dario Strbenac's suggestion and Gabe Becker's PR#18016.)

• Lithuanian translations are now available. (Thanks to Rimantas Žakauskas.)

• ‘names()’ now works for ‘DOTSXP’ objects. On the other hand, in ‘R-lang’, the R language manual, we now warn against relying on the structure or even existence of such ‘dot-dot-dot’ objects.

• ‘all.equal()’ no longer gives an error on ‘DOTSXP’ objects.

• ‘capabilities("cairo")’ now applies only to the file-based devices as it is now possible (if very unusual) to build R with Cairo support for those but not for ‘X11()’.

• There is optional support for tracing the progress of ‘loadNamespace()’ - see its help.

• (Not Windows.) ‘l10n_info()’ reports an additional element, the name of the encoding as reported by the OS (which may differ from the encoding part (if any) of the result from ‘Sys.getlocale("LC_CTYPE")’.

• New function ‘gregexec()’ which generalizes ‘regexec()’ to find _all_ disjoint matches and well as all substrings corresponding to parenthesized subexpressions of the given regular expression. (Contributed by Brodie Gaslam.)

• New function ‘charClass()’ in package ‘utils’ to query the wide-character classification functions in use (such as ‘iswprint’).

• The names of ‘quantile()’'s result no longer depend on the global ‘getOption("digits")’, but ‘quantile()’ gets a new optional argument ‘digits = 7’ instead.

• ‘grep()’, ‘sub()’, ‘regexp’ and variants work considerably faster for long factors with few levels. (Thanks to Michael Chirico's PR#18063.)

• Provide grouping of ‘x11()’ graphics windows within a window manager such as ‘Gnome’ or ‘Unity’; thanks to a patch by Ivan Krylov posted to R-devel.

• The ‘split()’ method for class ‘data.frame’ now allows the ‘f’ argument to be specified as a formula.

• ‘sprintf’ now warns on arguments unused by the format string.

• New palettes ‘"Rocket"’ and ‘"Mako"’ for ‘hcl.colors()’ (approximating palettes of the same name from the 'viridisLite' package).

  Contributed by Achim Zeileis.

• The base environment and its namespace are now locked (so one can no longer add bindings to these or remove from these).

• ‘Rterm’ handling of multi-byte characters has been improved, allowing use of such characters when supported by the current locale.

• ‘Rterm’ now accepts ‘ALT+ +xxxxxxxx’ sequences to enter Unicode characters as hex digits.

• Environment variable ‘LC_ALL’ on Windows now takes precedence over ‘LC_CTYPE’ and variables for other supported categories, matching the POSIX behaviour.

CHANGES IN R 4.1.0 GRAPHICS

• The graphics engine version, ‘R_GE_version’, has been bumped to ‘14’ and so packages that provide graphics devices should be reinstalled.

• Graphics devices should now specify ‘deviceVersion’ to indicate what version of the graphics engine they support.

• Graphics devices can now specify ‘deviceClip’. If ‘TRUE’, the graphics engine will never perform any clipping of output itself.

  The clipping that the graphics engine does perform (for both ‘canClip = TRUE’ and ‘canClip = FALSE’) has been improved to avoid producing unnecessary artifacts in clipped output.

• The ‘grid’ package now allows ‘gpar(fill)’ to be a ‘linearGradient()’, a ‘radialGradient()’, or a ‘pattern()’. The ‘viewport(clip)’ can now also be a grob, which defines a clipping path, and there is a new ‘viewport(mask)’ that can also be a grob, which defines a mask.

  These new features are only supported so far on the Cairo-based graphics devices and on the ‘pdf()’ device.

• (Not Windows.) A warning is given when a Cairo-based type is specified for a ‘png()’, ‘jpeg()’, ‘tiff()’ or ‘bmp()’ device but Cairo is unsupported (so ‘type = "Xlib"’ is tried instead).

• ‘grSoftVersion()’ now reports the versions of FreeType and FontConfig if they are used directly (not _via_ Pango), as is most commonly done on macOS.

CHANGES IN R 4.1.0 C-LEVEL FACILITIES

• The _standalone_ ‘libRmath’ math library and R's C API now provide ‘log1pexp()’ again as documented, and gain ‘log1mexp()’.

CHANGES IN R 4.1.0 INSTALLATION on a UNIX-ALIKE

• ‘configure’ checks for a program ‘pkgconf’ if program ‘pkg-config’ is not found. These are now only looked for on the path (like almost all other programs) so if needed specify a full path to the command in ‘PKG_CONFIG’, for example in file ‘config.site’.

• C99 function ‘iswblank’ is required - it was last seen missing ca 2003 so the workaround has been removed.

• There are new ‘configure’ options ‘--with-internal-iswxxxxx’, ‘--with-internal-towlower’ and ‘--with-internal-wcwidth’ which allows the system functions for wide-character classification, case-switching and width (‘wcwidth’ and ‘wcswidth’) to be replaced by internal ones. The first has long been used on macOS, AIX (and Windows) but this enables it to be unselected there and selected for other platforms (it is the new default on Solaris). The second is new in this version of R and is selected by default on macOS and Solaris. The third has long been the default and remains so as it contains customizations for East Asian languages.

  System versions of these functions are often minimally implemented (sometimes only for ASCII characters) and may not cover the full range of Unicode points: for example Solaris (and Windows) only cover the Basic Multilingual Plane.

• Cairo installations without X11 are more likely to be detected by ‘configure’, when the file-based Cairo graphics devices will be available but not ‘X11(type = "cairo")’.

• There is a new ‘configure’ option ‘--with-static-cairo’ which is the default on macOS. This should be used when only static cairo (and where relevant, Pango) libraries are available.

• Cairo-based graphics devices on platforms without Pango but with FreeType/FontConfig will make use of the latter for font selection.

CHANGES IN R 4.1.0 LINK-TIME OPTIMIZATION on a UNIX-ALIKE

• Configuring with flag ‘--enable-lto=R’ now also uses LTO when installing the recommended packages.

• ‘R CMD INSTALL’ and ‘R CMD SHLIB’ have a new flag ‘--use-LTO’ to use LTO when compiling code, for use with R configured with ‘--enable-lto=R’. For R configured with ‘--enable-lto’, they have the new flag ‘--no-use-LTO’.

  Packages can opt in or out of LTO compilation _via_ a ‘UseLTO’ field in the ‘DESCRIPTION’ file. (As usual this can be overridden by the command-line flags.)

CHANGES IN R 4.1.0 BUILDING R on Windows

• for GCC >= 8, ‘FC_LEN_T’ is defined in ‘config.h’ and hence character lengths are passed from C to Fortran in _inter alia_ BLAS and LAPACK calls.

• There is a new text file ‘src/gnuwin32/README.compilation’, which outlines how C/Fortran code compilation is organized and documents new features:

  • R can be built with Link-Time Optimization with a suitable compiler - doing so with GCC 9.2 showed several inconsistencies which have been corrected.

  • There is support for cross-compiling the C and Fortran code in R and standard packages on suitable (Linux) platforms. This is mainly intended to allow developers to test later versions of compilers - for example using GCC 9.2 or 10.x has detected issues that GCC 8.3 in Rtools40 does not.

  • There is experimental support for cross-building R packages with C, C++ and/or Fortran code.

• The R installer can now be optionally built to support a single architecture (only 64-bit or only 32-bit).

CHANGES IN R 4.1.0 PACKAGE INSTALLATION

• The default C++ standard has been changed to C++14 where available (which it is on all currently checked platforms): if not (as before) C++11 is used if available otherwise C++ is not supported.

  Packages which specify C++11 will still be installed using C++11.

  C++14 compilers may give deprecation warnings, most often for ‘std::random_shuffle’ (deprecated in C++14 and removed in C++17). Either specify C++11 (see ‘Writing R Extensions’) or modernize the code and if needed specify C++14. The latter has been supported since R 3.4.0 so the package's ‘DESCRIPTION’ would need to include something like

  Depends: R (>= 3.4)

CHANGES IN R 4.1.0 PACKAGE INSTALLATION on Windows

• ‘R CMD INSTALL’ and ‘R CMD SHLIB’ make use of their flag ‘--use-LTO’ when the ‘LTO_OPT’ make macro is set in file ‘etc/${R_ARCH}/Makeconf’ or in a personal/site ‘Makevars’ file. (For details see ‘Writing R Extensions’ §4.5.)

  This provides a valuable check on code consistency. It does work with GCC 8.3 as in Rtools40, but that does not detect everything the CRAN checks with current GCC do.

CHANGES IN R 4.1.0 PACKAGE INSTALLATION on macOS

• The default personal library directory on builds with ‘--enable-aqua’ (including CRAN builds) now differs by CPU type, one of

  ~/Library/R/x86_64/x.y/library ~/Library/R/arm64/x.y/library

  This uses the CPU type R (and hence the packages) were built for, so when a ‘x86_64’ build of R is run under Rosetta emulation on an ‘arm64’ Mac, the first is used.

CHANGES IN R 4.1.0 UTILITIES

• ‘R CMD check’ can now scan package functions for bogus ‘return’ statements, which were possibly intended as ‘return()’ calls (wish of PR#17180, patch by Sebastian Meyer). This check can be activated via the new environment variable ‘_R_CHECK_BOGUS_RETURN_’, true for ‘--as-cran’.

• ‘R CMD build’ omits tarballs and binaries of previous builds from the top-level package directory. (PR#17828, patch by Sebastian Meyer.)

• ‘R CMD check’ now runs sanity checks on the use of ‘LazyData’, for example that a ‘data’ directory is present and that ‘LazyDataCompression’ is not specified without ‘LazyData’. For packages with large LazyData databases without specifying ‘LazyDataCompression’, there is a reference to the code given in ‘Writing R Extensions’ §1.1.6 to test the choice of compression (as in all the CRAN packages tested a non-default method was preferred).

• ‘R CMD build’ removes ‘LazyData’ and ‘LazyDataCompression’ fields from the ‘DESCRIPTION’ file of packages without a ‘data’ directory.

CHANGES IN R 4.1.0 ENCODING-RELATED CHANGES

• The parser now treats ‘\Unnnnnnnn’ escapes larger than the upper limit for Unicode points (‘\U10FFFF’) as an error as they cannot be represented by valid UTF-8.

  Where such escapes are used for outputting non-printable (including unassigned) characters, 6 hex digits are used (rather than 8 with leading zeros). For clarity, braces are used, for example ‘\U{0effff}’.

• The parser now looks for non-ASCII spaces on Solaris (as previously on most other OSes).

• There are warnings (including from the parser) on the use of unpaired surrogate Unicode points such as ‘\uD834’. (These cannot be converted to valid UTF-8.)

• Functions ‘nchar()’, ‘tolower()’, ‘toupper()’ and ‘chartr()’ and those using regular expressions have more support for inputs with a marked Latin-1 encoding.

• The character-classification functions used (by default) to replace the system ‘iswxxxxx’ functions on Windows, macOS and AIX have been updated to Unicode 13.0.0.

  The character-width tables have been updated to include new assignments in Unicode 13.0.0.

• The code for evaluating default (extended) regular expressions now uses the same character-classification functions as the rest of R (previously they differed on Windows, macOS and AIX).

• There is a build-time option to replace the system's wide-character ‘wctrans’ C function by tables shipped with R: use ‘configure’ option ‘--with-internal-towlower’ or (on Windows) ‘-DUSE_RI18N_CASE’ in ‘CFLAGS’ when building R. This may be needed to allow ‘tolower()’ and ‘toupper()’ to work with Unicode characters beyond the Basic Multilingual Plane where not supported by system functions (e.g. on Solaris where it is the new default).

• R is more careful when truncating UTF-8 and other multi-byte strings that are too long to be printed, passed to the system or libraries or placed into an internal buffer. Truncation will no longer produce incomplete multibyte characters.

CHANGES IN R 4.1.0 DEPRECATED AND DEFUNCT

• Function ‘plclust()’ from the package ‘stats’ and ‘package.dependencies()’, ‘pkgDepends()’, ‘getDepList()’, ‘installFoundDepends()’, and ‘vignetteDepends()’ from package ‘tools’ are defunct.

• Defunct functions ‘checkNEWS()’ and ‘readNEWS()’ from package ‘tools’ and ‘CRAN.packages()’ from ‘utils’ have been removed.

• ‘R CMD config CXXCPP’ is defunct (it was deprecated in R 3.6.2).

• ‘parallel::detectCores()’ drops support for Irix (retired in 2013).

• The ‘LINPACK’ argument to ‘chol.default()’, ‘chol2inv()’, ‘solve.default()’ and ‘svd()’ has been defunct since R 3.1.0. It was silently ignored up to R 4.0.3 but now gives an error.

• Subsetting/indexing, such as ‘ddd[*]’ or ‘ddd$x’ on a ‘DOTSXP’ (dot-dot-dot) object ‘ddd’ has been disabled; it worked by accident only and was undocumented.

CHANGES IN R 4.1.0 BUG FIXES

• Many more C-level allocations (mainly by ‘malloc’ and ‘strdup’) are checked for success with suitable alternative actions.

• Bug fix for ‘replayPlot()’; this was turning off graphics engine display list recording if a recorded plot was replayed in the same session. The impact of the bug became visible if resize the device after replay OR if attempted another ‘savePlot()’ after replay (empty display list means empty screen on resize or empty saved plot).

• ‘R CMD check’ etc now warn when a package exports non-existing S4 classes or methods, also in case of no “methods” presence. (Reported by Alex Bertram; reproducible example and patch by Sebastian Meyer in PR#16662.)

• ‘boxplot()’ now also accepts ‘call’s for labels such as ‘ylab’, the same as ‘plot()’. (Reported by Marius Hofert.)

• The help page for ‘xtabs()’ now correctly states that ‘addNA’ is setting ‘na.action = na.pass’ among others. (Reported as PR#17770 by Thomas Soeiro.)

• The ‘R CMD check <pkg>’ gives a longer and more comprehensible message when ‘DESCRIPTION’ misses dependencies, e.g., in ‘Imports:’. (Thanks to the contributors of PR#17179.)

• ‘update.default()’ now calls the generic ‘update()’ on the formula to work correctly for models with extended formulas. (As reported and suggested by Neal Fultz in PR#17865.)

• The horizontal position of leaves in a dendrogram is now correct also with ‘center = FALSE’. (PR#14938, patch from Sebastian Meyer.)

• ‘all.equal.POSIXt()’ no longer warns about and subsequently ignores inconsistent ‘"tzone"’ attributes, but describes the difference in its return value (PR#17277). This check can be disabled _via_ the new argument ‘check.tzone = FALSE’ as suggested by Sebastian Meyer.

• ‘as.POSIXct()’ now populates the ‘"tzone"’ attribute from its ‘tz’ argument when ‘x’ is a logical vector consisting entirely of ‘NA’ values.

• ‘x[[2^31]] <- v’ now works. (Thanks to the report and patch by Suharto Anggono in PR#17330.)

• In log-scale graphics, ‘axis()’ ticks and label positions are now computed more carefully and symmetrically in their range, typically providing _more_ ticks, fulfilling wishes in PR#17936. The change really corresponds to an improved ‘axisTicks()’ (package ‘grDevices’), potentially influencing ‘grid’ and ‘lattice’, for example.

• ‘qnorm(<very large negative>, log.p=TRUE)’ is now correct to at least five digits where it was catastrophically wrong, previously.

• ‘sum(df)’ and similar ‘"Summary"’- and ‘"Math"’-group member functions now work for data frames ‘df’ with ‘logical’ columns, notably also of zero rows. (Reported to R-devel by Martin “b706”.)

• ‘unsplit()’ had trouble with tibbles due to unsound use of ‘rep(NA, len)’-indexing, which should use ‘NA_integer_’ (Reported to R-devel by Mario Annau.)

• ‘pnorm(x, log.p = TRUE)’ underflows to ‘-Inf’ slightly later.

• ‘show(<hidden S4 generic>)’ prints better and without quotes for non-hidden S4 generics.

• ‘read.table()’ and relatives treated an "NA" column name as missing when ‘check.names = FALSE’ PR#18007.

• Parsing strings containing UTF-16 surrogate pairs such as ‘"\uD834\uDD1E"’ works better on some (uncommon) platforms. ‘sprintf("%X", utf8ToInt("\uD834\uDD1E"))’ should now give ‘"1D11E"’ on all platforms.

• ‘identical(x,y)’ is no longer true for differing ‘DOTSXP’ objects, fixing PR#18032.

• ‘str()’ now works correctly for DOTSXP and related exotics, even when these are doomed.

  Additionally, it no longer fails for ‘list’s with a ‘class’ and “irregular” method definitions such that e.g. ‘lapply(*)’ will necessarily fail, as currently for different ‘igraph’ objects.

• Too long lines in environment files (e.g. ‘Renviron’) no longer crash R. This limit has been increased to 100,000 bytes. (PR#18001.)

• There is a further workaround for FreeType giving incorrect italic font faces with cairo-based graphics devices on macOS.

• ‘add_datalist(*, force = TRUE)’ (from package ‘tools’) now actually updates an existing ‘data/datalist’ file for new content. (Thanks to a report and patch by Sebastian Meyer in PR#18048.)

• ‘cut.Date()’ and ‘cut.POSIXt()’ could produce an empty last interval for ‘breaks = "months"’ or ‘breaks = "years"’. (Reported as PR#18053 by Christopher Carbone.)

• Detection of the encoding of ‘regular’ macOS locales such as ‘en_US’ (which is UTF-8) had been broken by a macOS change: fortunately these are now rarely used with ‘en_US.UTF-8’ being preferred.

• ‘sub()’ and ‘gsub(pattern, repl, x, *)’ now keep attributes of ‘x’ such as ‘names()’ also when ‘pattern’ is ‘NA’ (PR#18079).

• Time differences (‘"difftime"’ objects) get a replacement and a ‘rep()’ method to keep ‘"units"’ consistent. (Thanks to a report and patch by Nicolas Bennett in PR#18066.)

• The \RdOpts macro, setting defaults for \Sexpr options in an Rd file, had been ineffective since R 2.12.0: it now works again. (Thanks to a report and patch by Sebastian Meyer in PR#18073.)

• ‘mclapply’ and ‘pvec’ no longer accidentally terminate parallel processes started before by ‘mcparallel’ or related calls in package ‘parallel’ (PR#18078).

• ‘grep’ and other functions for evaluating (extended) regular expressions handle in Unicode also strings not explicitly flagged UTF-8, but flagged native when running in UTF-8 locale.

• Fixed a crash in ‘fifo’ implementation on Windows (PR#18031).

• Binary mode in ‘fifo’ on Windows is now properly detected from argument ‘open’ (PR#15600, PR#18031).