This blog is updated daily.
A general description is here.
Added a work-around for a bug in macOS 14.3.1 and higher which prevents R plots in the Quartz Cocoa device from updating on screen.
‘predict(<rank-deficient lm>, newdata=*)’ fix computing of ‘nbasis’, see Russ Lenth's comment 29 in PR#16158.
‘pbeta(x, a,b)’ is correct now for ‘x’=0 or 1 in the boundary cases where ‘a’ or ‘b’ or both are 0, fixing PR#18672 thanks to Michael Fay.
‘pmatch(x, table)’ for large ‘table’, also called for data frame row selection, ‘dfrm[nm, ]’, is now interruptible, fixing PR#18656.
‘iconv()’ now fixes up variant encoding names such as ‘"utf8"’ case-insensitively.
The legacy ‘encoding = "MacRoman"’ is deprecated in ‘pdf()’ and ‘postscript()’: support was incomplete in earlier versions of R.
Arguments are now properly forwarded to methods on S4 generics with ... in the middle of their formal arguments. This was broken for the case when a method introduced an argument but did not include ... in its own formals. Thanks to Hervé Pagès for the report PR#18538.
Some invalid ‘file’ arguments to ‘pictex()’, ‘postscript()’ and ‘xfig()’ opened a file called ‘NA’ rather than throw an error. These included ‘postscript(NULL)’ (which some people expected to work like ‘pdf(NULL)’).
Passing ‘filename = NA’ to ‘svg()’, ‘cairo_pdf()’, ‘cairo_ps()’ or the Cairo-based bitmap devices opened a file called ‘NA’: it now throws an error.
‘quartz(file = NA)’ opened a file called ‘NA’, including when used as a Quartz-based bitmap device. It now gives an error.
‘rank(<long vector>)’ now works, fixing PR#18617, thanks to Ilia Kats.
‘seq.int()’ did not adequately check its ‘length.out’ argument.
‘match(<POSIXct>, .)’ is correct again for differing time zones, ditto for ‘"POSIXlt"’, fixing PR#18618 reported by Bastian Klein.
‘drop.terms(*, dropx = <0-length>)’ now works, fixing PR#18563 as proposed by Mikael Jagan.
‘drop.terms(*)’ keeps ‘ + offset(.)’ terms when it should, PR#18565, and ‘drop.terms()’ no longer makes up a response, PR#18566, fixing both bugs thanks to Mikael Jagan.
‘getS3method("t", "test")’ no longer finds the ‘t.test()’ function, fixing PR#18627.
‘pdf()’ and ‘postscript()’ support for the documented Adobe encodings ‘"Greek"’ and ‘"Cyrilllic"’ was missing (although the corresponding Windows' codepages could be used).
Computations of glyph metric information for ‘pdf()’ and ‘postscript()’ did not take into account that transliteration could replace one character by two or more (only seen on macOS 14) and typically warned that the information was not known.
‘rank(x)’ no longer overflows during integer addition, when computing rank average for largish but not-yet long vector ‘x’, fixing PR#18630, thanks to Ilia Kats.
‘list.files()’ on Windows now returns also files with names longer that 260 bytes (the Windows limit is 260 characters). Previously, some file names particularly with ‘East Asian’ characters were omitted.
‘cov2cor(<0 x 0>)’ now works, fixing PR#18423 thanks to Mikael Jagan and Elin Waring.
‘cov2cor(<negative diagonal>)’ and similar now give one warning instead of two, with better wording, fixing PR#18424 thanks to Mikael Jagan.
‘tools’‘:: startDynamicHelp()’ now ensures ‘port’ is in proper range, fixing PR#18645.
‘cov2cor(<0 x 0>)’ now works, fixing PR#18423 thanks to Mikael Jagan and Elin Waring.
‘rank(x)’ no longer overflows during integer addition, when computing rank average for largish but not-yet long vector ‘x’, fixing PR#18630, thanks to Ilia Kats.
‘cov2cor(<0 x 0>)’ now works, fixing PR#18423 thanks to Mikael Jagan and Elin Warning.
‘cov2cor(<negative diagonal>)’ and similar now give one warning instead of two, with better wording, fixing PR#18424 thanks to Mikael Jagan.
‘tools’‘:: startDynamicHelp()’ now ensures ‘port’ is in proper range, fixing PR#18645.
Startup banners, ‘R --version’, ‘sessionInfo()’ and ‘R CMD check’ no
longer report ‘(64-bit)’ as part of the platform as this is almost
universal - the increasingly rare 32-bit platforms will still report
‘(32-bit)’.
On Windows, ditto for window titles.
‘is.atomic(NULL)’ now returns ‘FALSE’, as ‘NULL’ is not an atomic
vector. Strict back-compatibility would replace ‘is.atomic(foo)’ by
‘(is.null(foo) || is.atomic(foo))’ but should happen only sparingly.
The ‘confint()’ methods for ‘"glm"’ and ‘"nls"’ objects have been
copied to the ‘stats’ package. Previously, they were stubs which
called versions in package ‘MASS’. The ‘MASS’ namespace is no longer
loaded if you invoke (say) ‘confint(glmfit)’. Further, the ‘"glm"’
method for ‘profile()’ and the ‘plot()’ and ‘pairs()’ methods for class
‘"profile"’ have been copied from ‘MASS’ to ‘stats’. (‘profile.nls()’
and ‘plot.profile.nls()’ were already in ‘stats’.)
The ‘confint()’ and ‘profile’ methods for ‘"glm"’ objects have gained a
possibility to do profiling based on the Rao Score statistic in
addition to the default Likelihood Ratio. This is controlled by a new
‘test =’ argument.
The ‘"glm"’ method for ‘anova()’ computes test statistics and p-values
by default, using a chi-squared test or an F test depending on whether
the dispersion is fixed or free. Test statistics can be suppressed by
giving argument ‘test’ a false logical value.
In ‘setRepositories()’ the repositories can be set using their names
via ‘name =’ instead of index ‘ind =’.
‘methods()’ and ‘.S3methods()’ gain a ‘all.names’ option for the (rare)
case where functions starting with a ‘.’ should be included.
Serializations can now be interrupted (e.g., by ‘Ctrl-C’ on a
Unix-alike) if they take too long, e.g., from ‘save.image()’, thanks to
suggestions by Ivan Krylov and others on R-devel.
New startup option ‘--max-connections’ to set the maximum number of
connections for the session. Defaults to 128 as before: allowed values
up to 4096 (but resource limits may in practice restrict to smaller
values).
R on Windows (since Windows 10 2004) now uses the new Segment Heap
allocator. This may improve performance of some memory-intensive
applications.
When R packages are built, typically by ‘R CMD build <pkg>’, the new
‘--user=<build_user>’ option overrides the (internally determined) user
name, currently ‘Sys.info()["user"]’ or ‘LOGNAME’. This is a
(modified) fulfillment of Will Landau's suggestion in PR#17530.
‘tools::testInstalledBasic()’ gets new optional arguments ‘outDir’ and
‘testSrcdir’, e.g., allowing to use it in a ‘<builddir> != <srcdir>’
setup, and in standard “binary” Windows installation *if* a source
‘tests/’ folder is present.
‘range(<DT_with_Inf>, finite = TRUE)’ now work for objects of class
‘"Date"’, ‘"POSIXct"’, and ‘"POSIXlt"’ with infinite entries,
analogously to ‘range.default()’, as proposed by Davis Vaughan on
R-devel. Other ‘range()’-methods can make use of new ‘.rangeNum()’.
New ‘.internalGenerics’ complementing ‘.S3PrimitiveGenerics’, for
documentation and low-level book keeping.
‘grid()’ now invisibly returns the x- and y- coordinates at which the
grid-lines were drawn.
‘norm(., type)’ now also works for complex matrices.
‘kappa(., exact = TRUE, norm = *)’ now works for all norms and also for
complex matrices. In symmetric / triangular cases, new argument ‘uplo
= "U" | "L"’ allows to specify the upper or lower triangular part.
‘memDecompress(type = "unknown")’ recognizes compression in the default
‘zlib’ format as used by ‘memCompress(type = "gzip")’.
‘memCompress()’ and ‘memDecompress()’ will use the ‘libdeflate’ library
(<https://github.com/ebiggers/libdeflate>) if installed. This uses the
same type of compression for ‘type = "gzip"’ but is 1.5-2x faster than
the system ‘libz’ library on some common platforms: the speed-up may
depend on the library version.
‘diff()’ for objects of class ‘"Date"’, ‘"POSIXct"’, and ‘"POSIXlt"’
accepts a ‘units’ argument passed via ‘...’.
Dynamic help now does a much better job rendering package ‘DESCRIPTION’
metadata.
‘Rprof()’ gains an ‘event’ argument and support for elapsed (real) time
profiling on Unix (PR#18076).
‘filled.contour()’ gains ‘key.border’ argument.
‘tools::update_pkg_po()’ gets ‘pot_make’ and ‘mo_make’ options for
_not_ re-making the corresponding files, and additionally option
‘verbose’.
Hexadecimal string colour specifications are now accepted in short
form, so, for example, we can use ‘"#123"’, which is equivalent to
‘"#112233"’.
Thanks to MikeFC for the original idea and Ella Kaye, Malcolm Barrett, George Stagg, and Hanne Oberman for the patch.
Plain-text help shows \var markup with angle brackets.
The new experimental primitive function ‘declare()’ is intended to
eventually allow information about R code to be communicated to the
interpreter, compiler, and code analysis tools. The syntax for
declarations is still being developed.
Functions ‘psmirnov()’, ‘qsmirnov()’ and ‘rsmirnov()’ in package
‘stats’ have argument ‘two.sided’ changed to ‘alternative’, to take
into account that the permutation distributions of the one-sided
statistics can be different in the case of ties. Consequence of
PR#18582.
‘sort()’ is now an implicit S4 generic in ‘methods’.
Formatting and printing, ‘format(z), print(z)’, of complex vectors ‘z’
no longer zap relatively small real or imaginary parts to zero, fixing
PR#16752. This is an API change, as it was documented previously to
round real and imaginary parts together on purpose, producing nicer
looking output. As mentioned, e.g. in the PR, this change is
compatible to many other “R-like” programming environments.
We have simplified the internal code and now basically format the real and imaginary parts independently of each other.
New experimental functions ‘Tailcall’ and ‘Exec’ to support writing
stack-space-efficient recursive functions.
Where characters are attempted to be plotted by ‘pdf()’, ‘postscript()’
and ‘xfig()’ which are not in the selected 8-bit character set (most
often Latin-1) and the R session is using a UTF-8 locale, the warning
messages will show the UTF-8 character rather than its bytes and one
dot will be substituted per character rather than per byte. (Platforms
whose ‘iconv()’ does transliteration silently plot the
transliteration.)
In a UTF-8 locale some transliterations are now done with a warning (e.g., dashes and Unicode minus to hyphen, ligatures are expanded, permille (‘‰’) is replaced by ‘o/oo’), although the OS may have got there first. These are warnings as they will continue to be replaced by dots in earlier versions of R.
The matrix multiplication functions ‘crossprod()’ and ‘tcrossprod()’
are now also primitive and S3 generic, as ‘%*%’ had become in R 4.3.0.
‘source()’ and ‘example()’ have a new optional argument ‘catch.aborts’
which allows continued evaluation of the R code after an error.
The non-Quartz ‘tiff()’ devices allow additional types of compression
if supported by the platform's ‘libtiff’ library.
The list of base and recommended package names is now provided by
‘tools :: standard_package_names’.
‘cairo_pdf()’ and ‘cairo_ps()’ default to ‘onefile = TRUE’ to closer
match ‘pdf()’ and ‘postscript()’.
New option ‘catch.script.errors’ provides a documented way to catch
errors and continue in non-interactive use.
‘L %||% R’ newly in base is an expressive idiom for the
‘if(!is.null(L)) L else R’ or ‘if(is.null(L)) R else L’ phrases.
‘warnings()’ now always inherits from ‘"warnings"’ as documented, newly
also in the case of no warnings, where it previously returned ‘NULL’.
‘as.complex("1i")’ now returns ‘1i’ instead of ‘NA’ with a warning.
‘z <- c(NA, 1i)’ now keeps the imaginary part ‘Im(z[1]) == 0’, no
longer coercing to ‘NA_complex_’. Similarly, ‘cumsum(z)’ correctly
sums real and imaginary parts separately, i.e., without “crosstalk” in
case of ‘NA’s.
On Alpine Linux ‘iconv()’ now maps ‘"latin2"’, ‘"latin-2"’, ‘"latin9"’
and ‘"latin-9"’ to names the OS knows about (case-insensitively).
‘iconv(sub = "Unicode")’ now zero-pads to four (hex) digits, rather
than to 4 or 8. (This seems to have become the convention once Unicode
restricted the number of Unicode points to 2^31 - 1 and so will never
need more than 6 digits.)
‘NCOL(NULL)’ now returns 0 instead of 1, for consistency with
‘cbind()’.
Support for ‘encoding = "MacRoman"’ has been removed from the ‘pdf()’
and ‘postscript()’ devices - this was a legacy encoding supporting
classic macOS up to 2001 (with various revisions), and no longer has
universal ‘libiconv’ support.
System valgrind headers are required to use ‘configure’ option
‘--with-valgrind-instrumentation’ with value ‘1’ or ‘2’.
‘configure’ will warn if it encounters a 32-bit build, as that is
nowadays almost untested.
Environment variable ‘R_SYSTEM_ABI’ is no longer used and so no longer
recorded in ‘etc/Renviron’ (it was not on Windows and was only ever
used when preparing package ‘tools’).
If the ‘libdeflate’ library and headers are available, ‘libdeflate’
rather than ‘libz’ is used to (de)compress R objects in lazy-load
databases, Typically tasks spend up to 5% of their time on such
operations, although creating lazy-data databases is one of the
exceptions.
This can be suppressed if the library is available by the ‘configure’ option ‘--without-libdeflate-compression’.
‘configure’ option ‘--enable-lto=check’ has not worked reliably since
2019 and has been removed.
A new ‘configure’ option ‘--with-newAccelerate’ makes use of Apple's
‘new’ BLAS / LAPACK interfaces in their Accelerate framework. Those
interfaces are only available in macOS 13.3 or later, and building
requires SDK 13.3 or later (from the Command Line Tools or Xcode 14.3
or later).
By default the option uses new Accelerate for BLAS calls: to also use it for LAPACK use ‘--with-newAccelerate=lapack’. The later interfaces provide LAPACK 3.9.1 rather than 3.2.1: 3.9.1 is from 2021-04 and does not include the improved algorithms introduced in LAPACK 3.10.0 (including for BLAS calls).
‘R CMD check’ notes when S4-style exports are used without declaring a
strong dependence on package ‘methods’.
‘tools::checkRd()’ (used by ‘R CMD check’) detects more problems with
\Sexpr-based dynamic content, including bad nesting of \Sexprs and
invalid arguments.
‘tools::checkRd()’ now reports Rd titles and section names ending in a
period; this is ignored by ‘R CMD check’ unless environment variable
‘_R_CHECK_RD_CHECKRD_MINLEVEL_’ is set to -5 or smaller.
‘R CMD check’ now notes Rd files without an \alias, as long documented
in ‘Writing R Extensions’ §1.3.1. The check for a missing \description
has been moved from ‘tools::checkRd()’ to ‘tools::checkRdContents()’.
‘R CMD check’ now visits ‘inst/NEWS.Rd’ when checking Rd files.
‘tools::checkDocFiles()’ and ‘tools::checkRdContents()’ now also check
internal Rd files by default, but “specially” (ignoring missing
documentation of arguments).
‘R CMD Rdiff’ gets option ‘--useEx’.
‘R CMD check’ now warns on non-portable uses of Fortran ‘KIND’ such as
‘INTEGER(KIND=4)’ and ‘REAL(KIND=8)’.
To see the failing lines set environment variable ‘_R_CHECK_FORTRAN_KIND_DETAILS_’ to a true value.
When checking Rd files, ‘R CMD check --as-cran’ now notes some of the
“lost braces” that ‘tools::checkRd()’ finds. Typical problems are Rd
macros missing the initial backslash (e.g., ‘code{...}’), in-text set
notation (e.g., ‘{1, 2}’, where the braces need escaping), and \itemize
lists with _description_-like entries of the form
\item{label}{description}.
Headers ‘R_ext/Applic.h’ and ‘R-ext/Linpack.h’ used to include
‘R_ext/BLAS.h’ although this was undocumented and unneeded by their
documented entry points. They no longer do so.
New ‘R_missing()’, factored out from ‘do_missing()’, used to fix
PR#18579.
‘SEXP’ type ‘S4SXP’ has been renamed ‘OBJSXP’ to support experimenting
with alternative object systems. The ‘S4SXP’ value can still be used
in ‘C’ code but is now deprecated. Based on contributions from the R
Consortium Object-Oriented Programming Working Group.
‘data()’ no longer handles zipped data from long-defunct (since R
2.13.0) ‘--use-zip-data’ installations.
The legacy graphics devices ‘pictex()’ and ‘xfig()’ are now deprecated.
They do not support recent graphics enhancements and their
font-handling is rudimentary. The intention is to retain them for
historical interest as long as they remain somewhat functional.
The methods package is more robust to not being attached to the search
path. More work needs to be done.
‘pairwise.t.test()’ misbehaved when subgroups had 0 DF for variance,
even with ‘pool.sd=TRUE’ PR#18594 (Jack Berry).
Probability distribution functions ‘[dpq]<distrib>(x, *)’, but also
‘bessel[IKJY](x, .)’ are now consistently preserving ‘attributes(x)’
when ‘length(x) == 0’, e.g., for a 2 x 0 matrix, thanks to Karolis
Koncevičius' report PR#18509.
Group “Summary” computations such as ‘sum(1:3, 4, na.rm = 5, NA, 7,
na.rm = LL)’ now give an error instead of either ‘17’ or ‘NN’ for ‘LL’
true or false, as proposed by Ivan Krylov on the R-devel mailing list.
(This also means it is now an error to specify ‘na.rm’ more than once.)
‘as.complex(x)’ now returns ‘complex(real=x, imaginary=0)’ for _all_
numerical and logical ‘x’, notably also for ‘NA’ or ‘NA_integer_’.
Directories are now omitted by ‘file.copy(,recursive = FALSE)’ and in
‘file.append()’ (PR#17337).
‘gsub()’ and ‘sub()’ are now more robust to integer overflow when
reporting errors caused by too large input strings (PR#18346).
Top-level handlers are now more robust to attempts to remove a handler
whilst handlers are running (PR#18508).
The handling of ‘Alt+F4’ in dialogs created on Windows using GraphApp
has been fixed (PR#13870).
‘density()’ more consistently computes grid values for the FFT-based
convolution, following Robert Schlicht's analysis and proposal in
PR#18337, correcting density values typically by a factor of about
0.999. Optional ‘old.coords=TRUE’ provides back compatibility.
‘palette.colors()’ gains a ‘name’ argument that defaults to ‘FALSE’
controlling whether the vector of colours that is returned has names
(where possible). PR#18529.
‘tools::xgettext()’ no longer extracts the (non-translatable) class
names from ‘warningCondition’ and ‘errorCondition’ calls.
‘S3method(<gen>, <class>, <func>)’ in the ‘NAMESPACE’ file now works
(again) when ‘<func>’ is visible from the namespace, e.g., imported, or
in base.
‘getParseData(f)’ now also works for a function defined in the first of
several ‘<pkg>/R/*.R’ source files, thanks to Kirill Müller's report
and Duncan Murdoch's patch in PR#16756.
Rd \Sexpr macros with nested #ifdef conditionals were not processed.
A non-blocking connection with non-default encoding such as a socket,
now correctly returns from ‘readLines()’ after new data has arrived
also when its ‘EOF’ had been reached previously. Thanks to Peter
Meilstrup's report on R-devel and Ivan Krylov's report and patch
proposal in PR#18555.
‘tools::checkRdContents()’ failed to detect empty argument descriptions
when they spanned multiple lines, including those generated by
‘prompt()’. These cases are now noted by ‘R CMD check’.
Plain-text help no longer outputs spurious colons in the arguments list
(for multi-line \item labels in the Rd source).
‘kappa()’ and ‘rcond()’ work correctly in more cases; ‘kappa(., norm =
"2")’ now warns that it computes the 1-norm with (default) ‘exact =
FALSE’; prompted by Mikael Jagan's quite comprehensive PR#18543.
Rd skeletons generated by ‘prompt()’ or ‘promptData()’ now use a dummy
title (so ‘R CMD build’ works). ‘tools::checkRdContents()’ has been
updated to detect such template leftovers, including from
‘promptPackage()’.
When S4 method dispatch fails because no method was found, the error
message now includes the signature argument names; thanks to Michael
Chirico's proposal on R-devel.
‘withAutoprint({ .. })’ now preserves ‘srcref’s previously lost, thanks
to Andrew Simmons' report plus fix in PR#18572.
‘transform.data.frame()’ no longer adjusts names; in particular,
untransformed variables are kept as-is, including those with
syntactically invalid names (PR#17890).
The ‘keep.source’ option for Rd \Sexpr blocks is no longer ignored.
The ‘formula’ methods for ‘t.test()’ and ‘wilcox.test()’ now catch when
‘paired’ is passed, addressing PR#14359; use ‘Pair(x1, x2) ~ 1’ for a
paired test.
The level reported in the browser prompt was often too large. It now
shows the number of browser contexts on the stack.
For ‘cbind()’ and ‘rbind()’, the optional ‘deparse.level’ argument is
now properly passed to methods, thanks to Mikael Jagan's PR#18579 and
comments there.
Some error and warning messages for large (‘long vector’) ‘matrix(v,
nr, nc)’ and ‘dim(m) <- d’ are now correct about sizes, using ‘long
long’ formatting, fixing PR#18612 (and more) reported by Mikael Jagan.
‘readChar(useBytes = TRUE)’ now terminates strings even when the
underlying connection uses extra spacea in the input buffer. This
fixes problems with extra garbage seen with ‘gzip’ connections,
PR#18605.
Named capture in PCRE regular expressions now works also with more than
127 named groups (PR#18588).
Datetime functions are now robust against long jumps when dealing with
internal time zone changes. This avoids confusing warnings about an
invalid time zone, previously triggered by turning warnings into errors
or handling them via ‘tryCatch’ (PR#17966, PR#17780).
Datetime functions now restore even an empty ‘TZ’ environment variable
after internal time zone changes (PR#17724). This makes results of
datetime functions with this (typically unintentional) setting more
predictable.
‘drop.terms(*)’ now drops response as by default, ‘keep.response =
FALSE’, fixing PR#18564 thanks to Mikael Jagan.
‘dummy.coef(.)’ now also works for ‘lm()’-models with ‘character’
categorical predictor variables rather than ‘factor’ ones, fixing
PR#18635 reported by Jinsong Zhao.
‘formals(f) <- formals(f)’ now also works for a function w/o arguments
and atomic _constant_ ‘body(f)’.
Correct ‘as.function(<invalid list>, .)’'s error message.
Startup banners, ‘R --version’, ‘sessionInfo()’ and ‘R CMD check’ no longer report ‘(64-bit)’ as part of the platform as this is almost universal - the increasingly rare 32-bit platforms will still report ‘(32-bit)’.
On Windows, ditto for window titles.
‘is.atomic(NULL)’ now returns ‘FALSE’, as ‘NULL’ is not an atomic vector. Strict back-compatibility would replace ‘is.atomic(foo)’ by ‘(is.null(foo) || is.atomic(foo))’ but should happen only sparingly.
The ‘confint()’ methods for ‘"glm"’ and ‘"nls"’ objects have been copied to the ‘stats’ package. Previously, they were stubs which called versions in package ‘MASS’. The ‘MASS’ namespace is no longer loaded if you invoke (say) ‘confint(glmfit)’. Further, the ‘"glm"’ method for ‘profile()’ and the ‘plot()’ and ‘pairs()’ methods for class ‘"profile"’ have been copied from ‘MASS’ to ‘stats’. (‘profile.nls()’ and ‘plot.profile.nls()’ were already in ‘stats’.)
The ‘confint()’ and ‘profile’ methods for ‘"glm"’ objects have gained a possibility to do profiling based on the Rao Score statistic in addition to the default Likelihood Ratio. This is controlled by a new ‘test =’ argument.
The ‘"glm"’ method for ‘anova()’ computes test statistics and p-values by default, using a chi-squared test or an F test depending on whether the dispersion is fixed or free. Test statistics can be suppressed by giving argument ‘test’ a false logical value.
In ‘setRepositories()’ the repositories can be set using their names via ‘name =’ instead of index ‘ind =’.
‘methods()’ and ‘.S3methods()’ gain a ‘all.names’ option for the (rare) case where functions starting with a ‘.’ should be included.
Serializations can now be interrupted (e.g., by ‘Ctrl-C’ on a Unix-alike) if they take too long, e.g., from ‘save.image()’, thanks to suggestions by Ivan Krylov and others on R-devel.
New startup option ‘--max-connections’ to set the maximum number of connections for the session. Defaults to 128 as before: allowed values up to 4096 (but resource limits may in practice restrict to smaller values).
R on Windows (since Windows 10 2004) now uses the new Segment Heap allocator. This may improve performance of some memory-intensive applications.
When R packages are built, typically by ‘R CMD build <pkg>’, the new ‘--user=<build_user>’ option overrides the (internally determined) user name, currently ‘Sys.info()["user"]’ or ‘LOGNAME’. This is a (modified) fulfillment of Will Landau's suggestion in PR#17530.
‘tools::testInstalledBasic()’ gets new optional arguments ‘outDir’ and ‘testSrcdir’, e.g., allowing to use it in a ‘<builddir> != <srcdir>’ setup, and in standard “binary” Windows installation *if* a source ‘tests/’ folder is present.
‘range(<DT_with_Inf>, finite = TRUE)’ now work for objects of class ‘"Date"’, ‘"POSIXct"’, and ‘"POSIXlt"’ with infinite entries, analogously to ‘range.default()’, as proposed by Davis Vaughan on R-devel. Other ‘range()’-methods can make use of new ‘.rangeNum()’.
New ‘.internalGenerics’ complementing ‘.S3PrimitiveGenerics’, for documentation and low-level book keeping.
‘grid()’ now invisibly returns the x- and y- coordinates at which the grid-lines were drawn.
‘norm(., type)’ now also works for complex matrices.
‘kappa(., exact = TRUE, norm = *)’ now works for all norms and also for complex matrices. In symmetric / triangular cases, new argument ‘uplo = "U" | "L"’ allows to specify the upper or lower triangular part.
‘memDecompress(type = "unknown")’ recognizes compression in the default ‘zlib’ format as used by ‘memCompress(type = "gzip")’.
‘memCompress()’ and ‘memDecompress()’ will use the ‘libdeflate’ library (<https://github.com/ebiggers/libdeflate>) if installed. This uses the same type of compression for ‘type = "gzip"’ but is 1.5-2x faster than the system ‘libz’ library on some common platforms: the speed-up may depend on the library version.
‘diff()’ for objects of class ‘"Date"’, ‘"POSIXct"’, and ‘"POSIXlt"’ accepts a ‘units’ argument passed via ‘...’.
Dynamic help now does a much better job rendering package ‘DESCRIPTION’ metadata.
‘Rprof()’ gains an ‘event’ argument and support for elapsed (real) time profiling on Unix (PR#18076).
‘filled.contour()’ gains ‘key.border’ argument.
‘tools::update_pkg_po()’ gets ‘pot_make’ and ‘mo_make’ options for _not_ re-making the corresponding files, and additionally option ‘verbose’.
Hexadecimal string colour specifications are now accepted in short form, so, for example, we can use ‘"#123"’, which is equivalent to ‘"#112233"’.
Thanks to MikeFC for the original idea and Ella Kaye, Malcolm Barrett, George Stagg, and Hanne Oberman for the patch.
Plain-text help shows \var markup with angle brackets.
The new experimental primitive function ‘declare()’ is intended to eventually allow information about R code to be communicated to the interpreter, compiler, and code analysis tools. The syntax for declarations is still being developed.
Functions ‘psmirnov()’, ‘qsmirnov()’ and ‘rsmirnov()’ in package ‘stats’ have argument ‘two.sided’ changed to ‘alternative’, to take into account that the permutation distributions of the one-sided statistics can be different in the case of ties. Consequence of PR#18582.
‘sort()’ is now an implicit S4 generic in ‘methods’.
Formatting and printing, ‘format(z), print(z)’, of complex vectors ‘z’ no longer zap relatively small real or imaginary parts to zero, fixing PR#16752. This is an API change, as it was documented previously to round real and imaginary parts together on purpose, producing nicer looking output. As mentioned, e.g. in the PR, this change is compatible to many other “R-like” programming environments.
We have simplified the internal code and now basically format the real and imaginary parts independently of each other.
New experimental functions ‘Tailcall’ and ‘Exec’ to support writing stack-space-efficient recursive functions.
Where characters are attempted to be plotted by ‘pdf()’, ‘postscript()’ and ‘xfig()’ which are not in the selected 8-bit character set (most often Latin-1) and the R session is using a UTF-8 locale, the warning messages will show the UTF-8 character rather than its bytes and one dot will be substituted per character rather than per byte. (Platforms whose ‘iconv()’ does transliteration silently plot the transliteration.)
In a UTF-8 locale some transliterations are now done with a warning (e.g., dashes and Unicode minus to hyphen, ligatures are expanded, permille (‘‰’) is replaced by ‘o/oo’), although the OS may have got there first. These are warnings as they will continue to be replaced by dots in earlier versions of R.
The matrix multiplication functions ‘crossprod()’ and ‘tcrossprod()’ are now also primitive and S3 generic, as ‘%*%’ had become in R 4.3.0.
‘source()’ and ‘example()’ have a new optional argument ‘catch.aborts’ which allows continued evaluation of the R code after an error.
The non-Quartz ‘tiff()’ devices allow additional types of compression if supported by the platform's ‘libtiff’ library.
The list of base and recommended package names is now provided by ‘tools :: standard_package_names’.
‘cairo_pdf()’ and ‘cairo_ps()’ default to ‘onefile = TRUE’ to closer match ‘pdf()’ and ‘postscript()’.
New option ‘catch.script.errors’ provides a documented way to catch errors and continue in non-interactive use.
‘L %||% R’ newly in base is an expressive idiom for the ‘if(!is.null(L)) L else R’ or ‘if(is.null(L)) R else L’ phrases.
‘warnings()’ now always inherits from ‘"warnings"’ as documented, newly also in the case of no warnings, where it previously returned ‘NULL’.
‘as.complex("1i")’ now returns ‘1i’ instead of ‘NA’ with a warning.
‘z <- c(NA, 1i)’ now keeps the imaginary part ‘Im(z[1]) == 0’, no longer coercing to ‘NA_complex_’. Similarly, ‘cumsum(z)’ correctly sums real and imaginary parts separately, i.e., without “crosstalk” in case of ‘NA’s.
On Alpine Linux ‘iconv()’ now maps ‘"latin2"’, ‘"latin-2"’, ‘"latin9"’ and ‘"latin-9"’ to names the OS knows about (case-insensitively).
‘iconv(sub = "Unicode")’ now zero-pads to four (hex) digits, rather than to 4 or 8. (This seems to have become the convention once Unicode restricted the number of Unicode points to 2^31 - 1 and so will never need more than 6 digits.)
‘NCOL(NULL)’ now returns 0 instead of 1, for consistency with ‘cbind()’.
Support for ‘encoding = "MacRoman"’ has been removed from the ‘pdf()’ and ‘postscript()’ devices - this was a legacy encoding supporting classic macOS up to 2001 (with various revisions), and no longer has universal ‘libiconv’ support.
System valgrind headers are required to use ‘configure’ option ‘--with-valgrind-instrumentation’ with value ‘1’ or ‘2’.
‘configure’ will warn if it encounters a 32-bit build, as that is nowadays almost untested.
Environment variable ‘R_SYSTEM_ABI’ is no longer used and so no longer recorded in ‘etc/Renviron’ (it was not on Windows and was only ever used when preparing package ‘tools’).
If the ‘libdeflate’ library and headers are available, ‘libdeflate’ rather than ‘libz’ is used to (de)compress R objects in lazy-load databases, Typically tasks spend up to 5% of their time on such operations, although creating lazy-data databases is one of the exceptions.
This can be suppressed if the library is available by the ‘configure’ option ‘--without-libdeflate-compression’.
‘configure’ option ‘--enable-lto=check’ has not worked reliably since 2019 and has been removed.
A new ‘configure’ option ‘--with-newAccelerate’ makes use of Apple's ‘new’ BLAS / LAPACK interfaces in their Accelerate framework. Those interfaces are only available in macOS 13.3 or later, and building requires SDK 13.3 or later (from the Command Line Tools or Xcode 14.3 or later).
By default the option uses new Accelerate for BLAS calls: to also use it for LAPACK use ‘--with-newAccelerate=lapack’. The later interfaces provide LAPACK 3.9.1 rather than 3.2.1: 3.9.1 is from 2021-04 and does not include the improved algorithms introduced in LAPACK 3.10.0 (including for BLAS calls).
‘R CMD check’ notes when S4-style exports are used without declaring a strong dependence on package ‘methods’.
‘tools::checkRd()’ (used by ‘R CMD check’) detects more problems with \Sexpr-based dynamic content, including bad nesting of \Sexprs and invalid arguments.
‘tools::checkRd()’ now reports Rd titles and section names ending in a period; this is ignored by ‘R CMD check’ unless environment variable ‘_R_CHECK_RD_CHECKRD_MINLEVEL_’ is set to -5 or smaller.
‘R CMD check’ now notes Rd files without an \alias, as long documented in ‘Writing R Extensions’ §1.3.1. The check for a missing \description has been moved from ‘tools::checkRd()’ to ‘tools::checkRdContents()’.
‘R CMD check’ now visits ‘inst/NEWS.Rd’ when checking Rd files.
‘tools::checkDocFiles()’ and ‘tools::checkRdContents()’ now also check internal Rd files by default, but “specially” (ignoring missing documentation of arguments).
‘R CMD Rdiff’ gets option ‘--useEx’.
‘R CMD check’ now warns on non-portable uses of Fortran ‘KIND’ such as ‘INTEGER(KIND=4)’ and ‘REAL(KIND=8)’.
To see the failing lines set environment variable ‘_R_CHECK_FORTRAN_KIND_DETAILS_’ to a true value.
When checking Rd files, ‘R CMD check --as-cran’ now notes some of the “lost braces” that ‘tools::checkRd()’ finds. Typical problems are Rd macros missing the initial backslash (e.g., ‘code{...}’), in-text set notation (e.g., ‘{1, 2}’, where the braces need escaping), and \itemize lists with _description_-like entries of the form \item{label}{description}.
Headers ‘R_ext/Applic.h’ and ‘R-ext/Linpack.h’ used to include ‘R_ext/BLAS.h’ although this was undocumented and unneeded by their documented entry points. They no longer do so.
New ‘R_missing()’, factored out from ‘do_missing()’, used to fix PR#18579.
‘SEXP’ type ‘S4SXP’ has been renamed ‘OBJSXP’ to support experimenting with alternative object systems. The ‘S4SXP’ value can still be used in ‘C’ code but is now deprecated. Based on contributions from the R Consortium Object-Oriented Programming Working Group.
‘data()’ no longer handles zipped data from long-defunct (since R 2.13.0) ‘--use-zip-data’ installations.
The legacy graphics devices ‘pictex()’ and ‘xfig()’ are now deprecated. They do not support recent graphics enhancements and their font-handling is rudimentary. The intention is to retain them for historical interest as long as they remain somewhat functional.
The methods package is more robust to not being attached to the search path. More work needs to be done.
‘pairwise.t.test()’ misbehaved when subgroups had 0 DF for variance, even with ‘pool.sd=TRUE’ PR#18594 (Jack Berry).
Probability distribution functions ‘[dpq]<distrib>(x, *)’, but also ‘bessel[IKJY](x, .)’ are now consistently preserving ‘attributes(x)’ when ‘length(x) == 0’, e.g., for a 2 x 0 matrix, thanks to Karolis Koncevičius' report PR#18509.
Group “Summary” computations such as ‘sum(1:3, 4, na.rm = 5, NA, 7, na.rm = LL)’ now give an error instead of either ‘17’ or ‘NN’ for ‘LL’ true or false, as proposed by Ivan Krylov on the R-devel mailing list. (This also means it is now an error to specify ‘na.rm’ more than once.)
‘as.complex(x)’ now returns ‘complex(real=x, imaginary=0)’ for _all_ numerical and logical ‘x’, notably also for ‘NA’ or ‘NA_integer_’.
Directories are now omitted by ‘file.copy(,recursive = FALSE)’ and in ‘file.append()’ (PR#17337).
‘gsub()’ and ‘sub()’ are now more robust to integer overflow when reporting errors caused by too large input strings (PR#18346).
Top-level handlers are now more robust to attempts to remove a handler whilst handlers are running (PR#18508).
The handling of ‘Alt+F4’ in dialogs created on Windows using GraphApp has been fixed (PR#13870).
‘density()’ more consistently computes grid values for the FFT-based convolution, following Robert Schlicht's analysis and proposal in PR#18337, correcting density values typically by a factor of about 0.999. Optional ‘old.coords=TRUE’ provides back compatibility.
‘palette.colors()’ gains a ‘name’ argument that defaults to ‘FALSE’ controlling whether the vector of colours that is returned has names (where possible). PR#18529.
‘tools::xgettext()’ no longer extracts the (non-translatable) class names from ‘warningCondition’ and ‘errorCondition’ calls.
‘S3method(<gen>, <class>, <func>)’ in the ‘NAMESPACE’ file now works (again) when ‘<func>’ is visible from the namespace, e.g., imported, or in base.
‘getParseData(f)’ now also works for a function defined in the first of several ‘<pkg>/R/*.R’ source files, thanks to Kirill Müller's report and Duncan Murdoch's patch in PR#16756.
Rd \Sexpr macros with nested #ifdef conditionals were not processed.
A non-blocking connection with non-default encoding such as a socket, now correctly returns from ‘readLines()’ after new data has arrived also when its ‘EOF’ had been reached previously. Thanks to Peter Meilstrup's report on R-devel and Ivan Krylov's report and patch proposal in PR#18555.
‘tools::checkRdContents()’ failed to detect empty argument descriptions when they spanned multiple lines, including those generated by ‘prompt()’. These cases are now noted by ‘R CMD check’.
Plain-text help no longer outputs spurious colons in the arguments list (for multi-line \item labels in the Rd source).
‘kappa()’ and ‘rcond()’ work correctly in more cases; ‘kappa(., norm = "2")’ now warns that it computes the 1-norm with (default) ‘exact = FALSE’; prompted by Mikael Jagan's quite comprehensive PR#18543.
Rd skeletons generated by ‘prompt()’ or ‘promptData()’ now use a dummy title (so ‘R CMD build’ works). ‘tools::checkRdContents()’ has been updated to detect such template leftovers, including from ‘promptPackage()’.
When S4 method dispatch fails because no method was found, the error message now includes the signature argument names; thanks to Michael Chirico's proposal on R-devel.
‘withAutoprint({ .. })’ now preserves ‘srcref’s previously lost, thanks to Andrew Simmons' report plus fix in PR#18572.
‘transform.data.frame()’ no longer adjusts names; in particular, untransformed variables are kept as-is, including those with syntactically invalid names (PR#17890).
The ‘keep.source’ option for Rd \Sexpr blocks is no longer ignored.
The ‘formula’ methods for ‘t.test()’ and ‘wilcox.test()’ now catch when ‘paired’ is passed, addressing PR#14359; use ‘Pair(x1, x2) ~ 1’ for a paired test.
The level reported in the browser prompt was often too large. It now shows the number of browser contexts on the stack.
For ‘cbind()’ and ‘rbind()’, the optional ‘deparse.level’ argument is now properly passed to methods, thanks to Mikael Jagan's PR#18579 and comments there.
Some error and warning messages for large (‘long vector’) ‘matrix(v, nr, nc)’ and ‘dim(m) <- d’ are now correct about sizes, using ‘long long’ formatting, fixing PR#18612 (and more) reported by Mikael Jagan.
‘readChar(useBytes = TRUE)’ now terminates strings even when the underlying connection uses extra spacea in the input buffer. This fixes problems with extra garbage seen with ‘gzip’ connections, PR#18605.
Named capture in PCRE regular expressions now works also with more than 127 named groups (PR#18588).
Datetime functions are now robust against long jumps when dealing with internal time zone changes. This avoids confusing warnings about an invalid time zone, previously triggered by turning warnings into errors or handling them via ‘tryCatch’ (PR#17966, PR#17780).
Datetime functions now restore even an empty ‘TZ’ environment variable after internal time zone changes (PR#17724). This makes results of datetime functions with this (typically unintentional) setting more predictable.
‘drop.terms(*)’ now drops response as by default, ‘keep.response = FALSE’, fixing PR#18564 thanks to Mikael Jagan.
‘dummy.coef(.)’ now also works for ‘lm()’-models with ‘character’ categorical predictor variables rather than ‘factor’ ones, fixing PR#18635 reported by Jinsong Zhao.
‘formals(f) <- formals(f)’ now also works for a function w/o arguments and atomic _constant_ ‘body(f)’.
Correct ‘as.function(<invalid list>, .)’'s error message.
The legacy ‘encoding = "MacRoman"’ is deprecated in ‘pdf()’ and ‘postscript()’: support was incomplete in earlier versions of R.
‘drop.terms(*, dropx = <0-length>)’ now works, fixing PR#18563 as proposed by Mikael Jagan.
‘pdf()’ and ‘postscript()’ support for the documented Adobe encodings ‘"Greek"’ and ‘"Cyrilllic"’ was missing (although the corresponding Windows' codepages could be used).
The legacy ‘encoding = "MacRoman"’ is deprecated in ‘pdf()’, ‘postscript()’.
‘drop.terms(*)’ keeps ‘ + offset(.)’ terms when it should, PR#18565, and ‘drop.terms()’ no longer makes up a response, PR#18566, fixing both bugs thanks to Mikael Jagan.
Computations of glyph metric information for ‘pdf()’ and ‘postscript()’ did not take into account that transliteration could replace one character by two or more (only seen on macOS 14) and typically warned that the information was not known.
The C prototypes for LAPACK calls ‘dspgv’ and ‘dtptrs’ in ‘R_ext/Lapack.h’ had one too many and one too few character length arguments - but this has not caused any known issues. To get the corrected prototypes, include
#include <Rconfig.h> // for PR18534fixed #ifdef PR18534fixed # define usePR18534fix 1 #endif #include <R_ext/Lapack.h>
in your C/C++ code (PR#18534).
The deprecated legacy S-compatibility macros ‘PROBLEM’, ‘MESSAGE’, ‘ERROR’, ‘WARN’, ‘WARNING’, ‘RECOVER’, ... are no longer defined in ‘R_ext/RS.h’ (included by ‘R.h’). Replace these by calls to ‘Rf_error’ and ‘Rf_warning’ (defined in header ‘R_ext/Error.h’ included by ‘R.h’).
Header ‘R_ext/RS.h’ no longer includes ‘R_ext/Error.h’.
Arguments are now properly forwarded to methods on S4 generics with ... in the middle of their formal arguments. This was broken for the case when a method introduced an argument but did not include ... in its own formals. Thanks to Hervé Pagès for the report PR#18538.
‘list.files()’ on Windows now returns also files with names longer that 260 bytes (the Windows limit is 260 characters). Previously, some file names particularly with ‘East Asian’ characters were omitted.
‘getS3method("t", "test")’ no longer finds the ‘t.test()’ function, fixing PR#18627.
‘iconv()’ now fixes up variant encoding names such as ‘"utf8"’ case-insensitively.
‘pdf()’ and ‘postscript()’ support for the documented Adobe encodings ‘"Greek"’ and ‘"Cyrilllic"’ was missing (although the corresponding Windows' codepages could be used). (And also for the legacy ‘"MacRoman"’ encoding.)
Computations of glyph metric informaation for ‘pdf()’ and ‘postscript()’ did not take into account that transliteration could replace one character by two or more (only seen on macOS 14) and typically warned that the information was not known.
‘pdf()’ and ‘postscript()’ support for the documented Adobe encodings ‘"Greek"’ and ‘"Cyrilllic"’ was missing (although the corresponding Windows' codepages could be used).
‘drop.terms(*, dropx=<0-length>)’ now works, fixing PR#18563 as proposed by Mikael Jagan.
‘match(<POSIXct>, .)’ is correct again for differing time zones, ditto for ‘"POSIXlt"’, fixing PR#18618 reported by Bastian Klein.
Some invalid ‘file’ arguments to ‘pictex()’, ‘postscript()’ and
‘xfig()’ opened a file called ‘NA’ rather than throw an error. These
included ‘postscript(NULL)’ (which some people expected to work like
‘pdf(NULL)’).
Passing ‘filename = NA’ to ‘svg()’, ‘cairo_pdf()’, ‘cairo_ps()’ or the Cairo-based bitmap devices opened a file called ‘NA’: it now throws an error.
‘quartz(file = NA)’ opened a file called ‘NA’, including when used as a Quartz-based bitmap device. It now gives an error.
Some invalid ‘file’ arguments to ‘pictex()’, ‘postscript()’ and ‘xfig()’ opened a file called ‘NA’ rather than throw an error. These included ‘postscript(NULL)’ (which some people expected to work like ‘pdf(NULL)’).
Passing ‘filename = NA’ to ‘svg()’, ‘cairo_pdf()’, ‘cairo_ps()’ or the Cairo-based bitmap devices opened a file called ‘NA’: it now throws an error.
‘quartz(file = NA)’ opened a file called ‘NA’, including when used as a Quartz-based bitmap device. It now gives an error.
‘rank(<long vector>)’ now works, fixing PR#18617, thanks to Ilia Kats.
Some invalid ‘file’ arguments to ‘pictex()’, ‘postscript()’ and ‘xfig()’ opened a file called ‘NA’ rather than throw an error. These included ‘postscript(NULL)’ (which some people expected to work like ‘pdf(NULL)’).
Passing ‘filename = NA’ to ‘svg()’, ‘cairo_pdf()’, ‘cairo_ps()’ or the Cairo-based bitmap devices opened a file called ‘NA’: it now throws an error.
‘quartz(file = NA)’ opened a file called ‘NA’, including when used as a Quartz-based bitmap device. It now gives an error.
‘seq.int()’ did not adequately check its ‘length.out’ argument.
Some invalid ‘file’ arguments to ‘pictes()’, ‘postscript()’ and ‘xfig()’ opened a file called ‘NA’ rather than throw an error. These included ‘postscript(NULL)’ (which some people expected to work like ‘pdf(NULL)’).
Passing ‘filename = NA’ to ‘svg()’, ‘cairo_pdf()’, ‘cairo_ps()’ or the Cairo-based bitmap devices opened a file called ‘NA’: it now throws an error.
‘quartz(file = NA)’ opened a file called ‘NA’, including when used as a Quartz-based bitmap device. It now gives an error.
‘tools::checkRd()’ no longer produces spurious notes about “unnecessary braces” from multi-line Rd results of \Sexpr macros.
‘tar(*, tar = "internal")’ no longer creates out-of-spec tar files in the very rare case of user or group names longer than 32 bytes, fixing PR#17871 with thanks to Ivan Krylov.
When using the “internal” timezone datetime code, adding a fraction of a second no longer adds one second, fixing PR#16856 from a patch by Ivan Krylov.
The default initialization of the ‘"repos"’ option from the ‘repositories’ file at startup can be skipped by setting environment variable ‘R_REPOSITORIES’ to ‘NULL’ such that ‘getOption("repos")’ is empty if not set elsewhere.
‘qr.X()’ is now an implicit S4 generic in ‘methods’.
‘iconv(to = "ASCII//TRANSLIT")’ is emulated using substitution on platforms which do not support it (notably Alpine Linux). This should give a human-readable conversion in ASCII on all platforms (rather than ‘NA_character_’).
‘trans3d()’ gains options ‘continuous’ and ‘verbose’ addressing the problem of possible “wrap around” when projecting too long curves, as reported by Achim Zeileis in PR#18537.
‘tools::showNonASCII()’ has been rewritten to work better on macOS 14 (which has a changed implementation of ‘iconv()’).
‘tiff(type = "quartz")’ (the default on macOS) now warns if ‘compression’ is specified: it continues to be ignored.
There is some support for building with Intel's LLVM-based compilers on ‘x86_64’ Linux, such as (C) ‘icx’, (C++) ‘ipcx’ and (Fortran) ‘ifx’ from oneAPI 2023.x.y.
There is support for using LLVM's ‘flang-new’ as the Fortran compiler from LLVM 16.0.x (preferably 17.0.0 or later).
‘R CMD check’ reports the use of the Fortran 90 random number generator ‘RANDOM_NUMBER()’ and the subroutines to initialize it.
‘Writing R Extensions’ has example code to use R's RNGs from Fortran.
‘substr(x, n, L) <- cc’ now works (more) correctly for multibyte UTF-8 strings ‘x’ when ‘L > nchar(x)’, thanks to a report and patch by ‘Architect 95’.
‘contrib.url(character())’ now returns 0-length ‘character()’ as documented, which also avoids spurious warnings from ‘available.packages()’ et al. in the edge case of an empty vector of repository URLs.
‘readChar(., 4e8)’ no longer fails, thanks to Kodi Arfer's report (PR#18557).
‘lapply(<list>, as.data.frame)’ no longer warns falsely for some base vector components.
Communication between parent and child processes in the ‘multicore’ part of ‘parallel’ could fail on platforms that do not support an arbitrarily large payload in system functions ‘read()’/‘write()’ on pipes (seen on macOS where a restriction to ‘INT_MAX’ bytes is documented, without doing a partial read unlike Linux). The payload is now split into 1Gb chunks to avoid that problem. (PR#18571)
‘qqplot(x,y, conf.level=.)’ gives better confidence bounds when ‘length(x) != length(y)’, thanks to Alexander Ploner's report and patch proposal (PR#18557).
‘norm(<0-length>, "2")’ now gives zero instead of an error, as all the other norm types, thanks to Mikael Jagan's PR#18542.
Build-stage Rd macros \packageAuthor and \packageMaintainer now process ‘Authors@R’, fixing ‘NA’ results when the package ‘DESCRIPTION’ omits ‘Author’ and ‘Maintainer’ fields.
Formatting and printing complex numbers could give things like ‘0.1683-0i’ because of rounding error: ‘-0i’ is now replaced by ‘+0i’.
‘postscript()’ refused to accept a ‘title’ comment containing the letter “W” (PR#18599).
‘isoreg(c(1,Inf))’ signals an error instead of segfaulting, fixing PR#18603.
‘tiff(type = "Xlib")’ was only outputting the last page of multi-page plots.
‘tools::latexToUtf8()’ again knows about ‘\~{n}’ and other letters with tilde, fixing a regression in R 4.3.0, and about ‘\^{i}’ as an alternative to ‘\^{\i}’ (similarly with other accents). Furthermore, LaTeX codes for accented I letters are now correctly converted, also fixing related mistakes in ‘tools::encoded_text_to_latex()’.
‘tiff(type = "Xlib")’ was only outputting the last page of multi-page plots.
‘tiff(type = "quartz")’ (the default on macOS) now warns if ‘compression’ is specified: it continues to be ignored.
‘tar(., files=*)’ now produces correctly the warning about invalid UID or GID of files, fixing PR#18344, reported by Martin Morgan.
‘tools::showNonASCII()’ has been rewritten to work better on macOS 14 (which has a changed implementation of ‘iconv()’).
‘tools::showNonASCII()’ has been rewritten to work better on macOS 14 (which has a changed implementation of ‘iconv()’.
‘isoreg(c(1,Inf))’ signals an error instead of segfaulting, fixing PR#18603.
‘postscript()’ refused to accept a ‘title’ comment containing the letter “W” (PR#18599).
There is some support for building with Intel's LLVM-based compilers on ‘x86_64’ Linux, such as (C) ‘icx’, (C++) ‘ipcx’ and (Fortran) ‘ifx’ from oneAPI 2023.x.y.
‘R CMD check’ reports the use of the Fortran 90 random number generator ‘RANDOM_NUMBER()’ and the subroutines to initialize it.
‘Writing R Extensions’ has example code to use R's RNGs from Fortran.
Formatting and printing complex numbers could give things like ‘0.1683-0i’ because of rounding error: ‘-0i’ is now replaced by ‘+0i’.
‘R CMD check’ reports the use of Fortran 90 random number generator ‘RANDOM_NUMBER()’ and the subroutines to initialize it.
‘Writing R Extensions’ has example code to use R's RNGs from Fortran.
‘norm(<0-length>, "2")’ now gives zero instead of an error, as all the other norm types, thanks to Mikael Jagan's PR#18542.
Build-stage Rd macros \packageAuthor and \packageMaintainer now process ‘Authors@R’, fixing ‘NA’ results when the package ‘DESCRIPTION’ omits ‘Author’ and ‘Maintainer’ fields.
‘trans3d()’ gains options ‘continuous’ and ‘verbose’ addressing the problem of possible “wrap around” when projecting too long curves, as reported by Achim Zeileis in PR#18537.
‘qqplot(x,y, conf.level=.)’ gives better confidence bounds when ‘length(x) != length(y)’, thanks to Alexander Ploner's report and patch proposal (PR#18557).
There is some support for building with Intel's LLVM-based compilers on ‘x86_64’ Linux, such as (C) ‘icx’, (C++) ‘ipcx’ and (Fortran) ‘ifx’ from oneAPI 2023.x.0.
There is support for using LLVM's ‘flang-new’ as the Fortran compiler from LLVM 16.0.x (preferably 17.0.0 or later).
‘lapply(<list>, as.data.frame)’ no longer warns falsely for some base vector components.
Communication between parent and child processes in the ‘multicore’ part of ‘parallel’ could fail on platforms that do not support an arbitrarily large payload in system functions ‘read()’/‘write()’ on pipes (seen on macOS where a restriction to ‘INT_MAX’ bytes is documented, without doing a partial read unlike Linux). The payload is now split into 1Gb chunks to avoid that problem. (PR#18571)
Writing to a clipboard connection works again, fixing a regression in R 4.2.0 (PR#18332). Re-using a closed clipboard connection no longer issues a spurious warning about an ignored encoding argument.
The default initialization of the ‘"repos"’ option from the ‘repositories’ file at startup can be skipped by setting environment variable ‘R_REPOSITORIES’ to ‘NULL’ such that ‘getOption("repos")’ is empty if not set elsewhere.
‘readChar(., 4e8)’ no longer fails, thanks to Kodi Arfer's report (PR#18557).
‘iconv(to = "ASCII//TRANSLIT")’ is emulated using substitution on platforms which do not support it (notably Alpine Linux). This should give a human-readable conversion in ASCII on all platforms (rather than ‘NA_character_’).
‘contrib.url(character())’ now returns 0-length ‘character()’ as documented, which also avoids spurious warnings from ‘available.packages()’ et al. in the edge case of an empty vector of repository URLs.
‘qr.X()’ is now an implicit S4 generic in ‘methods’.
‘substr(x, n, L) <- cc’ now works (more) correctly for multibyte UTF-8 strings ‘x’ when ‘L > nchar(x)’, thanks to a report and patch by ‘Architect 95’.
‘na.contiguous(x)’ now also returns the first run, when it is at the beginning and there is a later one of the same length; reported to R-devel, including a fix, by Georgi Boshnakov. Further, by default, it modifies only an existing ‘attr(*,"tsp")’ but otherwise no longer sets one.
‘chol(<not pos.def>, pivot = <T|F>)’ now gives a correct error or warning message (depending on ‘pivot’), thanks to Mikael Jagan's (PR#18541).
‘.S3methods()’, typically called from ‘methods()’, again marks methods from package ‘base’ as ‘visible’.
Also, the visibility of non-‘base’ methods is again determined by the method's presence in ‘search()’.
The C-level API version of R's ‘integrate()’, ‘Rdqags()’ in ‘Applic.h’, now returns the correct number of integrand evaluations ‘neval’, fixing PR#18515 reported and diagnosed by Stephen Wade.
The C prototypes for LAPACK calls ‘dspgv’ and ‘dtptrs’ in ‘R_exts/Lapack.h’ had one too many and one too few character length arguments - but this has not caused any known issues. To get the corrected prototypes, include
#include <Rconfig.h> // for PR18534fixed #ifdef PR18534fixed # define usePR18534fix 1 #endif #include <R_exts/Lapack.h>
in your C/C++ code (PR#18534).
Many of the checks of esoteric Internet operations and those using unreliable external sites have been moved to a new target that is not run by default and primarily intended for the core developers. To run them use
cd tests; make test-Internet-dev
‘.S3methods()’, typically called from ‘methods()’, again marks methods from package ‘base’ as ‘visible’.
‘tools::Rdiff()’ is now more robust against invalid strings, fixing installation tests on Windows without Rtools installed (PR#18530).
Fix (new) bug in ‘hcl.colors(2, *)’, by Achim Zeileis (PR#18523).
‘head(., <illegal>)’ and ‘tail(..)’ now produce more useful ‘"Error in ...."’ error messages, fixing PR#18362.
Package code syntax on Windows is checked in UTF-8 when UTF-8 is the native encoding.
The C-level API version of R's ‘integrate()’, ‘Rdqags()’ in ‘Applic.h’, now returns the correct number of integrand evaluations ‘neval’, fixing PR#18515 reported and diagnosed by Stephen Wade.
‘.S3methods()’, typically called from ‘methods()’, again marks methods from package ‘base’ as ‘visible’.
Fix (new) bug in ‘hcl.colors(2, *)’, by Achim Zeileis (PR#18523).
‘head(., <illegal>)’ and ‘tail(..)’ now produce more useful ‘"Error in ...."’ error messages, fixing PR#18362.
Package code syntax on Windows is checked in UTF-8 when UTF-8 is the native encoding.
The C prototypes for LAPACK calls ‘dspgv’ and ‘dtptrs’ in ‘R_exts/Lapack.h’ had one too many and one too few character length arguments - but this has not caused any known issues. To get the corrected prototypes, include
#include <Rconfig.h> // for PR18534fixed #ifdef PR18534fixed # define usePR18534fix 1 #endif #include <R_exts/Lapack.h>
in your C/C++ code (PR#18534).
.
‘tools::Rdiff()’ is now more robust against invalid strings, fixing installation tests on Windows without Rtools installed (PR#18530).
Many of the checks of esoteric Internet operations and those using unreliable external sites have been moved to a new target that is not run by default and primarily intended for the core developers. To run them use
cd tests; make test-Internet-dev
.
The ‘"glm"’ method for ‘anova()’ computes test statistics and p-values
by default, using a chi-squared test or an F test depending on whether
the dispersion is fixed or free. Test statistics can be suppressed by
giving argument ‘test’ a false logical value.
‘bs()’ and ‘ns()’ in the (typical) case of automatic knot construction, when some of the supposedly inner knots coincide with boundary knots, now moves them inside (with a warning), building on PR#18442 by Ben Bolker.
‘R CMD’ on Windows now skips the site profile with ‘--no-site-file’ and ‘--vanilla’ even when ‘R_PROFILE’ is set (PR#18512, from Kevin Ushey).
The ‘Rcomplex’ definition (in header ‘R_ext/Complex.h’) has been extended to prevent possible mis-compilation when interfacing with Fortran (PR#18430). The new definition causes compiler warnings with static initializers such as ‘{1, 2}’, which can be changed to ‘{.r=1, .i=2}’.
Using the new definition from C++ depends on compiler extensions supporting C features that have not been incorporated into the C++ standards but are available in ‘g++’ and ‘clang++’: this may result in C++ compiler warnings but these have been worked around for recent versions of common compilers (GCC, Apple/LLVM clang, Intel).
It is intended to change the inclusion of header ‘R_ext/Complex.h’ by other R headers, so C/C++ code files which make use of ‘Rcomplex’ should include that header explicitly.
The ‘Rcomplex’ definition (in header ‘R_ext/Complex.h’) has been extended to prevent possible mis-compilation when interfacing with Fortran (PR#18430). The new definition causes compiler warnings with static initializers such as ‘{1, 2}’, which can be changed to ‘{.r=1, .i=2}’.
Using the new definition from C++ depends on compiler extensions supporting C features that have not been incorporated into the C++ standards but are available in ‘g++’ and ‘clang++’: this may result in C++ compiler warnings.
It is intended to change the inclusion of header ‘R_ext/Complex.h’ by other R headers, so C/C++ code files which make use of ‘Rcomplex’ should include that header explicitly.
The ‘Rcomplex’ definition (in header ‘R_ext/Complex.h’) has been extended to prevent possible mis-compilation when interfacing with Fortran (PR#18430). The new definition causes compiler warnings with static initializers such as ‘{1, 2}’, which can be changed to ‘{.r=1, .i=2}’.
Using the new definition from C++ depends on compiler extensions supporting C features that have not been incorporated into the C++ standards but are available in ‘g++’ and ‘clang++’: this may result in C++ compiler warnings.
New generic ‘chooseOpsMethod()’ provides a mechanism for objects to resolve cases where two suitable methods are found for an Ops Group Generic. This supports experimenting with alternative object systems. Based on contributions by Tomasz Kalinowski in PR#18484.
The ‘tapply()’ function now accepts a data frame as its ‘X’ argument, and allows ‘INDEX’ to be a formula in that case. ‘by.data.frame()’ similarly allows ‘INDICES’ to be a formula.
The ‘"glm"’ method for ‘anova()’ computes test statistics and p-values by default, using a chi-squared test or an F test depending on whether the dispersion is fixed or free. Test statistics can be suppressed by giving argument ‘test’ a false logical value.
The matrix multiply operator ‘%*%’ is now an S3 generic, belonging to new group generic ‘matrixOps’. From Tomasz Kalinowski's contribution in PR#18483.
New function ‘array2DF()’ to convert arrays to data frames, particularly useful for the list arrays created by ‘tapply()’.
The performance of ‘df[j] <- value’ (including for missing ‘j’) and ‘write.table(df)’ has been improved for data frames ‘df’ with a large number of columns. (Thanks to Gabriel Becker's PR#18500, PR#18503 and discussants, prompted by a report from Toby Dylan Hocking on the R-devel mailing list.)
New generic ‘.AtNames()’ added to enable class-specific completions after ‘@’. The formerly internal function ‘findMatches()’ is now exported, mainly for use in methods for ‘.DollarNames()’ and ‘.AtNames()’.
new generic ‘chooseOpsMethod()’ provides a mechanism for objects to resolve cases where two suitable methods are found for an Ops Group Generic. This supports experimenting with alternative object systems. Based on contributions by Tomasz Kalinowski in PR#18484.
‘inherits(x, what)’ now accepts values other than a simple character vector for argument ‘what’. A new generic, ‘nameOfClass()’, is called to resolve the class name from ‘what’. This supports experimenting with alternative object systems. Based on contributions by Tomasz Kalinowski in PR#18485.
‘Rcomplex’ definition has been extended to prevent mis-compilation when interfacing with Fortran (PR#18430). The new definition causes compiler warnings with static initializers such as ‘{1, 2}’, which can be changed to ‘{.r=1, .i=2}’. The new definition depends on C++ compiler extensions supporting C features that haven't been incorporated into the C++ standards, which may result in C++ compiler warnings.
The ‘"glm"’ method for ‘anova()’ computes test statistics and p-values by default, using a Chisq test or an F test depending on whether the dispersion is fixed or free. Test statistics can be suppressed by giving argument ‘test’ a false logical value.
The performance of ‘write.table()’ has been improved for data frames with a large number of unclassed columns. (Thanks to Gabriel Becker's PR#18500, prompted by a report from Toby Dylan Hocking on the R-devel mailing list.)
The ‘"data.frame"’ method for ‘subset()’ now warns about extraneous arguments, typically catching the use of ‘=’ instead of ‘==’ in the ‘subset’ expression.
‘density(x, weights = *)’ now warns if automatic bandwidth selection happens without using ‘weights’; new optional ‘warnWbw’ may suppress the warning. Prompted by Christoph Dalitz' PR#18490 and its discussants.
The ‘print()’ method for class ‘"summary.glm"’ no longer shows summary statistics for the deviance residuals by default. Its optional argument ‘show.residuals’ can be used to show them if required.
The ‘tapply()’ function now accepts a data frame as its ‘X’ argument, and allows ‘INDEX’ to be a formula in that case.