This blog is updated daily.
A general description is here.
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.
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.
‘.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)’.
‘dimnames(table(d))’ is more consistent in the case where ‘d’ is a list with a single component, thanks to Thomas Soeiro's report to R-devel.
‘R CMD check --as-cran’ makes use of the environment variable ‘AUTORECONF’. See the “R Internals” manual §8 for further details.
‘txtProgresBar()’ now enforces a non-zero width for ‘char’, without which no progress can be visible.
‘substr(ch, start,end) <- new’ now e.g., preserves ‘names(ch)’; ditto for ‘substring()’, thanks to a patch from Brodie Gaslam.
‘as.character(<obj>)’ for ‘"hexmode"’ or ‘"octmode"’ objects now fulfils the important basic rule ‘as.character(x)[j] === as.character(x[j])’.
‘R CMD check --as-cran’ takes note of the environment variable ‘AUTORECONF’. See “R Internals” §8 for further details.
‘_R_CHECK_SRC_MINUS_W_IMPLICIT_’ now defaults to true: recent versions of Apple ‘clang’ on macOS have made implicit function declarations in C into a compilation error.
The deprecated legacy S-compatibility macros ‘PROBLEM’, ‘MESSAGE’, ‘ERROR’, ‘WARN’, ‘WARNING’, ‘RECOVER’, ... are no longer defined by default in ‘R_exts/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’).
For the time being the definitions can be reinstated by defining macro ‘R_LEGACY_S_DEFS’ to ‘1’ _before_ including any R header. Header ‘R_ext/RS.h’ will no longer include ‘R_ext/Error.h’ unless ‘R_LEGACY_S_DEFS’ is set to ‘1’.
Determining correct translation domain in non-base packages, addressing the combo of PR#18092 and PR#17998 (‘#c6’) with reports and _augmented_ patch #2904 by Suharto Anggono.
Note that ‘"R-base"’ is no longer default domain e.g., for top-level calls to ‘gettext()’; rather translation needs explicit ‘domain = *’ specification in such cases.
‘mapply()’ and hence ‘Map()’ now also obey the “max-or-0-if-any” recycling rule, such that, e.g., ‘Map(`+`, 1:3, 1[0])’ is valid now.
‘as.character(<obj>)’ for ‘"hexmode"’ or ‘"octmode"’ objects now fulfills the important basic rule ‘as.character(x)[j] === as.character(x[j])’.
‘removeSource(fn)’ now retains (other) ‘attributes(fn)’.
‘USE_FC_LEN_T’ will become the default: this uses the correct prototypes for Fortran BLAS/LAPACK routines called from C/C++, and requires adjustment of most such calls - see “Writing R Extensions”. [Currently planned for early Nov: CRAN package authors have been notified.]
‘identical(attrib.as.set=FALSE)’ now works correctly with data frames with default row names (Thanks to Charlie Gao's PR#18179).
‘USE_FC_LEN_T’ will become the default: this uses the correct protoypes for Fortran BLAS/LAPACK routines called from C/C++, and requires adjustmnt of most such calls - see “Writing R Extensions”. [Currently planned for early Nov: CRAN package authors have been notified.]
Determining correct translation domain in non-base packages, addressing the combo of PR#18092 and PR#17998 (‘#c6’) with reports and _augmented_ patch #2904 by Suharto Anggono.
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.
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.
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.
‘USE_FC_LEN_T’ will becomes the default: this uses the correct protoypes for Fortran BLAS/LAPACK routines called from C/C++, and requires adjustmnt of most such calls - see “Writing R Extensions”. [Currently planned for early Nov: CRAN package authors have been notified.]
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.
Non-integer ‘mgp’ ‘par()’ settings are now obeyed instead of truncated to integer, in ‘axis()’ and ‘mtext()’, thanks to Duncan Murdoch's report and suggestion in PR#18194.
‘mapply()’ and hence ‘Map()’ now also obey the “max-or-0-if-any” recycling rule, such that, e.g., ‘Map(`+`, 1:3, 1[0])’ is valid now.
‘as.character(<obj>)’ for ‘"hexmode"’ or ‘"octmode"’ objects now fulfills the important basic rule ‘as.character(x)[j] === as.character(x[j])’.
‘qqline(y = <object>)’ such as ‘y=I(.)’, now works, see also PR#18190.
‘mapply()’ and hence ‘Map()’ now also obey the “max-or-0-if-any” recycling rule, such that, e.g., ‘Map(`+`, 1:3, 1[0])’ is valid now.
‘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.
‘hist.default()’ gains new ‘fuzz’ argument, and the histogram ‘plot’ method no longer uses fractional axis ticks when displaying counts (‘"Frequency"’).
‘model.response()’ now strips an ‘"AsIs"’ class typically, thanks to Duncan Murdoch's report and other discussants in PR#18190.
\Sexpr{ch} now preserves ‘Encoding(ch)’. (Thanks to report and patch by
Jeroen Ooms in PR#18152.)
\Sexpr{ch} now preserves ‘Encoding(ch)’. (Thanks to report and patch by Jeroen Ooms in PR#18152.)
‘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.
The ‘Date’ and ‘POSIXt’ methods for ‘hist()’ and the ‘histogram’ method for ‘plot()’ now also use the new default ‘col = "lightgray"’ in consistency with the corresponding change to ‘hist()’'s default for R 4.0.0.
‘write.ftable()’ gains ‘sep = " "’ argument as suggested by Thomas Soeiro.
‘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 R Mathlib internal C function ‘bd0()’ (called indirectly from a dozen probability density and distribution functions such as ‘dpois()’, ‘dbinom()’, ‘dgamma()’, ‘pgamma()’ _etc_) has been complemented by a more sophisticated and (mostly) more accurate C function ‘ebd0()’, currently called only by internal ‘dpois_raw()’ improving accuracy for R level ‘dpois()’ and potentially others calling it such as ‘dnbinom()’, ‘dgamma()’ or ‘pgamma()’. (Thanks to Morten Welinder's PR#15628.)
‘write.table()’ gains ‘sep = " "’ argument as suggested by Thomas Soeiro.
The names of the locale categories supported by R's ‘Sys.getlocale()’ and ‘Sys.setlocale()’ are now provided by variable ‘.LC.categories’ in the ‘base’ namespace.
The macro ‘USE_RINTERNALS’ no longer has any effect when compiling package code. Packages which also use ‘R_NO_REMAP’ will need to ensure that the remapped names are used for calls to API functions that were formerly also made available as macros.
‘write.table()’ gets ‘sep = " "’ argument as suggested by Thomas Soeiro.
The names of locale categories supported by R's ‘Sys.getlocale()’ and ‘Sys.setlocale()’ are now provided by variable ‘.LC.categories’.
The R Mathlib internal function ‘bd0()’, indirectly called from a dozen of probability density and distribution functions such as ‘dpois()’, ‘dbinom()’, ‘dgamma()’, ‘pgamma()’ etc, has been complemented by a more sophisticated, (mostly) more accurate ‘ebd0()’, currently called only by internal ‘dpois_raw()’ improving accuracy for R level ‘dpois()’ and potentially others calling it such as ‘dnbinom()’, ‘dgamma()’ or ‘pgamma()’. (Thanks to Morten Welinder's PR#15628.)
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.
R on Windows uses again the system memory allocator. Previously, R
shipped with Doug Lea's allocator as a replacement to overcome
performance limitations seen with system allocators on earlier versions
of Windows. Like on Unix-alike, once using the system allocator, R on
Windows no longer provides ‘memory.limit()’, ‘memory.size()’,
command-line option ‘--max-mem-size’ and environment variable
‘R_MAX_MEM_SIZE’. The allocation limit was important on 32-bit
Windows, but R no longer supports 32-bit builds.
R on Windows now uses the system memory allocator. Doug Lea's allocator was used since R 1.2.0 to mitigate performance limitations seen with system allocators on earlier versions of Windows.
‘memory.limit()’ and ‘memory.size()’ are now stubs on Windows (as on Unix-alikes).
On Windows, the command-line option ‘--max-mem-size’ and environment variable ‘R_MAX_MEM_SIZE’ are defunct. The memory allocation limit was important for 32-bit Windows builds, but these are no longer supported.
R on Windows uses again the system memory allocator. Previously, R shipped with Doug Lea's allocator as a replacement to overcome performance limitations seen with system allocators on earlier versions of Windows. Like on Unix-alike, once using the system allocator, R on Windows no longer provides ‘memory.limit()’, ‘memory.size()’, command-line option ‘--max-mem-size’ and environment variable ‘R_MAX_MEM_SIZE’. The allocation limit was important on 32-bit Windows, but R no longer supports 32-bit builds.
Conversion of \Sexpr[]{<expR>} to LaTeX or HTML no longer produces long blocks of empty lines when ‘<expR>’ itself contains several lines all producing empty output. Thanks to a report and patch by Ivan Krylov posted to R-devel.
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.
‘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.)
There is a new function ‘.pretty()’ with option ‘bounds’ as a technical-utility version of ‘pretty()’. It and ‘pretty()’ gain a new argument ‘f.min’ with a better than back-compatible default.
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 ‘contrasts’ setter function ‘`contrasts<-`’ gains an explicit default ‘how.many = NULL’ rather than just using ‘missing(how.many)’.
‘grid.pretty()’ gains a new optional argument ‘n = 5’.
There is a new function ‘.pretty()’ with option ‘bounds’ as technical utility version of ‘pretty()’. It and ‘pretty()’ gain a new argument ‘f.min’ with a better than back-compatible default.
Function ‘grDevices::axisTicks()’ and related functions such as ‘graphics::axis()’ work better, notably for the log scale; partly because of the ‘pretty()’ improvements, but also because care is taken e.g., when ‘ylim’ is finite but ‘diff(ylim)’ is infinite.
‘nclass.FD()’ gains a ‘digits’ option.
‘R CMD INSTALL’ no longer tangles vignettes. This completes an ‘R CMD build’ change in R 3.0.0 and affects packages built before R 3.0.2. Such packages should be re-made with ‘R CMD build’ to have the tangled R code of vignettes shipped with the tarball.
The (non-default and deprecated) ‘method = "internal"’ for ‘download.file()’ and ‘url()’ no longer supports ‘http://’ nor ‘ftp://’ URIs. (It is used only for ‘file://’ URIs.)
On Windows, ‘download.file(method = "wininet")’ no longer supports ‘ftp://’ URIs. (It is no longer the default method, which is ‘"libcurl"’ and does.)
On Windows, the deprecated ‘method = "wininet"’ now gives a warning for ‘http://’ and ‘https://’ URIs for both ‘download.file()’ and ‘url()’. (It is no longer the default method.)
Messages from C code in the ‘cairo’ section of package ‘grDevices’ are now also offered for translation, thanks to Michael Chirico's PR#18123.
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.
The deprecated legacy S-compatibility macros ‘PROBLEM’, ‘MESSAGE’, ‘ERROR’, ‘WARN’, ‘WARNING’, ‘RECOVER’, ... are no longer defined by default in ‘R_exts/RS.h’ (included by ‘R.h’). Replace these by calls to ‘Rf_error’ and ‘Rf_warning’.
For the time being the definitions can be reinstated by defining macro ‘R_LEGACY_S_DEFS’ to ‘1’ _before_ including any R header. Header ‘R_ext/RS.h’ will no longer include ‘R_ext/Error.h’ unless ‘R_LEGACY_S_DEFS’ is set.
[Early warning: removal planned for Oct 8.]
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.
‘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.
‘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.
‘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.)
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.
‘_R_CHECK_DEPENDS_ONLY_’ can be applied selectively to examples, tests and/or vignettes in ‘R CMD check’: see the “R Internals” manual.
The legacy S-compatibility macros ‘PROBEM’, ‘MESSAGE’, ‘ERROR’, ‘WARN’, ‘WARNING’, ‘RECOVER’, ... are deprecated and are no longer defined by default in ‘R_exts/RS.h’ (included by ‘R.h’). Replace these by calls to ‘Rf_error’ and ‘Rf_warning’.
For the time being the definitions can be reinstated by defining macro ‘R_LEGACY_S_DEFS’ to ‘1’ _before_ including any R header. Header ‘R_ext/RS.h’ will no longer include ‘R_ext/Error.h’ unless ‘R_LEGACY_S_DEFS’ is set.
[Early warning: removal planned for Oct 8.]
‘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.)
New palettes ‘"Rocket"’ and ‘"Mako"’ for ‘hcl.colors()’ (approximating palettes of the same name from the ‘viridisLite’ package).
Contributed by Achim Zeileis.
‘R CMD INSTALL’ no longer tangles vignettes. This completes an ‘R CMD build’ change in R 3.0.0 and affects packages built before R 3.0.2. Such packages should be rebuilt to have the tangled R code of vignettes shipped with the tarball.
‘R CMD build’ no longer fails if a package vignette uses child documents and ‘inst/doc’ exists. (Thanks to Sebastian Meyer's PR#18156.)
When an R documentation (‘help’ source) file ‘man/foo.Rd’ in a package has \donttest{..} examples with a syntax error, it is now signalled as ERROR and with correct line numbers relating to the ‘*-Ex.R’ file, thanks to Duncan Murdoch and Sebastian Meyer's reports and patch proposals in PR#17501.
‘R CMD Rd2pdf’ no longer leaves an empty build directory behind when it aborts due to an already existing output file. (Thanks to Sebastian Meyer's PR#18141.)
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.
‘.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.
Conversion of \Sexpr[]{<expR>} to LaTeX or HTML no longer produces long blocks of empty lines when ‘<expR>’ itself contains several lines all producing empty output. Thanks to a report and patch by Ivan Krylow posted to R-devel.
‘_R_DEPENDS_ONLY_’ can be applied selectively to examples, tests and/or vignettes in ‘R CMD check’: see the “R Internals” manual.
‘density(x, weights=w, na.rm=TRUE)’ when ‘anyNA(x)’ is true, now removes weights “in parallel” to ‘x’, fixing PR#18151, reported by Matthias Gondan. Additionally, it gets a ‘subdensity’ option.
Histogram breaks rule ‘nclass.FD()’ gets ‘digits’ option.
‘require(pkg, quietly = TRUE)’ is quieter and in particular does not warn if the package is not found.
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.
‘make check’ now works also without a LaTeX installation. (Thanks to Sebastian Meyer's PR#18103.)
‘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.)
‘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.)
\Sexpr{ch} now preserves ‘Encoding(ch)’. (Thanks to report and patch by Jeroen Ooms in PR#18152.)
\Sexpr{ch} now preserves ‘Encoding(ch)’. (Thanks to report and patch by
Jeroen Ooms in PR#18152.)
‘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.)
‘R CMD check’ now reports byte-compilation errors during installation. These are not usually fatal but may result in parts of the package not being byte-compiled.
The error message for not finding vignette files when weaving has correct file sizes now. (Thanks to Sebastian Meyer's PR#18154.)
A number of non-API declarations and macro definitions have been moved from the installed header ‘Rinternals.h’ to the internal header ‘Defn.h’. Packages that only use entry points and definitions documented to be part of the API as specified in ‘Writing R Extensions’ §6 should not be affected.
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.)
The graphics engine's based ‘axisTicks()’ and related functions such as ‘graphics’ package's ‘axis()’ work better, notably for the log scale; partly because the ‘pretty()’ improvements, but also because care is taken e.g., when ‘ylim’ is finite, but ‘diff(ylim)’ is infinite.
New ‘.pretty()’ with option ‘bounds’ as technical utility version of ‘pretty()’, and it and ‘pretty()’ get new argument ‘f.min’ with a better than back-compatible default.
\Sexpr{ch} now preserves ‘Encoding(ch)’. (Thanks to report and patch by Jeroen Ooms in PR#18152.)
‘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$double.xmax’.
Also, it's been tweaked for very small ranges and when a boundary is close (or equal) to zero; e.g., ‘pretty(c(0,1e-317))’ no longer has negative numbers, currently still warning about a very small range, and ‘pretty(2^-(1024 - 2^-1/(c(24,10))))’ is more accurate.
New ‘.pretty()’ with option ‘bounds’ as technical utility version of ‘pretty()’.
‘pretty()’ gets option ‘bounds = TRUE’.
‘pretty(x)’ with finite ‘x’ now returns finite values also in the case
where the extreme ‘x’ values are close in size to the maximal
representable number ‘.Machine$double.xmax’.
‘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$double.xmax’.
‘grid.pretty()’ got new optional argument ‘n = 5’.
‘R CMD Rd2pdf’ no longer leaves an empty build directory behind when it aborts due to an already existing output file (PR#18141).
‘mean(x)’ with finite ‘x’ now is finite also without "long.double" capability.
‘model.frame()’ now clears the object bit when removing the ‘class’ attribute of a value via ‘na.action’ (PR#18100).
‘charClass()’ now works with multi-character strings on Windows (PR#18104, fixed by Bill Dunlap).
‘encodeString()’ on Solaris now works again in Latin-1 encoding on characters represented differently in UTF-8. Support for surrogate pairs on Solaris has been improved.
‘file.show()’ on Windows now works with non-ASCII path names representable in the current native encoding (PR#18132).
Embedded R on Windows can now find R home directory via the registry even when installed only for the current user (PR#18135).
‘pretty(x)’ with finite ‘x’ now returns finite values also in the case where the extreme ‘x’ values are close in size to the maximal representable number ‘.Machine$double.xmax’.
Messages from C code in the ‘cairo’ section of package ‘grDevices’ are now also up for translation, thanks to Michael Chirico's PR#18123.
The ‘contrasts’ setter ‘`contrasts<-`’ gets explicit default ‘how.many = NULL’ rather than just using ‘missing(how.many)’.
‘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’.
Environment variables ‘R_LIBS_USER’ and ‘R_LIBS_SITE’ are both now set to the R system default if unset or empty, and can be set to ‘NULL’ to indicate an empty list of user or site library directories.
The warning for ‘axis()’(-like) calls in cases of relatively small ranges (typically in log-scale situations) is slightly improved _and_ suppressed from explicit calls to ‘.axisPars()’ as has always been the intention.
‘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.
‘.First’ and ‘.Last’ can again be set from the site profile.
Environment variables ‘R_LIBS_USER’ and ‘R_LIBS_SITE’ are now consistently replaced by the R system default if unset or empty, and can be set to ‘NULL’ to indicate an empty list of user or site library directories.
‘R CMD check’ can optionally report files/directories left behind in home, ‘/tmp’ (even though ‘TMPDIR’ is set) and other directories. See the “R Internals” manual for details.
The non-API header ‘R_ext/R-ftp-http.h’ is no longer provided, as the entry points it covered are now all defunct.
The (non-default and deprecated) ‘method = "internal"’ for ‘download.file’ and ‘url’ no longer supports ‘http://’ nor ‘ftp://’ URIs. (It is used only for ‘file://’ URIs.)
On Windows, ‘download.file(method = "wininet")’ no longer supports ‘ftp://’ URIs. (It is no longer the default method, which is ‘"libcurl"’ and does.)
On Windows, the deprecated ‘method = "wininet"’ now gives a warning for ‘http://’ and ‘https://’ URIs for both ‘download.file’ and ‘url’. (It is no longer the default method.)
‘qnbinom(p, size, mu)’ for large ‘size/mu’ is corrected for a range of
cases (PR#18095); similarly for the ‘(size, prob)’ parametrization of
the negative binomial.
‘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.
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.
‘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.)
‘simplify2array()’ gains an ‘except’ argument for controlling the exceptions used by ‘sapply()’.
The (non-default and deprecated) ‘method = "internal"’ for ‘download.file’ and ‘url’ no longer supports ‘http://’ nor ‘ftp://’ URIs. (It is used only for ‘file://’ URIs.)
On Windows, ‘download.file(method = "wininet")’ no longer supports ‘ftp://’ URIs. (It is no longer the default method, which is ‘"libcurl"’ and does.)
‘make check’ now works also without a LaTeX installation. (Thanks to Sebastian Meyer's PR#18103.)
‘capabilities("libxml")’ is now false.
The description of ‘capabilities("http/ftp")’ now reflects that it refers to the default method, no longer the internal one.
‘matrix(x, n, m)’ now warns in more cases where ‘length(x)’ differs from ‘n * m’, as suggested by Abby Spurdle and Wolfgang Huber in Feb 2021 on the R-devel mailing list.
This warning can be turned into an error by setting environment variable ‘_R_CHECK_MATRIX_DATA_’ to ‘TRUE’: ‘R CMD check --as-cran’ does so unless it is already set.
Facilities for accessing ‘ftp://’ sites are no longer tested (except _pro tem_ for ‘curlGetHeaders()’) as modern browsers have removed support.
The (non-default and deprecated) ‘method = "internal"’ for ‘download.file’ and ‘url’ no longer supports ‘ftp://’ URIs.
Similarly on Windows for ‘download.file(method = "wininet")’.
Setting ‘digits = 0’ in ‘format()’, ‘print.default()’ (and hence typically ‘print()’) or ‘options()’ is again invalid. Its behaviour was platform-dependent, and it is unclear what “zero significant digits” should mean (PR#18098).
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.
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.
Setting ‘digits = 0’ in ‘format()’, ‘print.default()’ (and hence typically ‘print()’ or ‘options()’ is again invalid. Its behaviour was platform-dependent, and it is unclear what “zero significant digits” should mean (PR#18098).
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.)
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.
‘libcurl’ is now required.
Function ‘file_test()’ in package ‘utils’ gains tests for symlinks, readability and writability.
On Windows, ‘download.file(method = "auto")’ and ‘url(method = "default")’ now follow Unix in using ‘"libcurl"’ for all except ‘file://’ URIs.
Setting ‘digits = 0’ in ‘format()’ or ‘options()’ is again invalid. Its behaviour was platform-dependent, and it is unclear what “zero significant digits” should mean (PR#18098).
Using the non-default ‘method = "internal"’ for ‘http://’ and ‘ftp://’ URIs is deprecated for ‘download.file’ and ‘url’.
The non-API header ‘R_ext/R-ftp-http.h’ is no longer provided. The entry points it included are either deprecated or defunct.
Facilities for accessing ‘ftp://’ sites are no longer tested (except _pro tem_ for ‘curlGetHeaders()’) as browsers are increasing removing support.
On Windows, ‘download.file(method = "auto")’ uses ‘"libcurl"’ for ‘ftp://’ sites provided R was built with ‘libcurl’ support.
‘matrix(x, n, m)’ now warns in more cases where ‘length(x)’ differs from than ‘n * m’; suggested by Abby Spurdle and Wolfgang Huber in Feb 2021 on the R-devel mailing list.
This warning can be turned into an error by setting environment variable ‘_R_CHECK_MATRIX_DATA_’ to ‘TRUE’: ‘R CMD check --as-cran’ does so unless it is already set.
The (non-default) ‘method = "internal"’ for ‘download.file’ and ‘url’ no longer supports ‘ftp://’ URIs.
Similarly on Windows for ‘download.file(method = "wininet")’.
The (non-default) ‘method = "internal"’ for ‘download.file’ and ‘url’ no longer supports ‘ftp://’ URIs.
Function ‘file_test()’ in package ‘utils’ gains tests for symlinks, reability and writability.
‘matrix(x, n,m)’ now warns in more cases where ‘length(x)’ is larger than ‘n * m’; suggested by Abby Spurdle and Wolfgang Huber in Feb 2021 on the R-devel mailing list.
Using the non-default ‘method = "internal"’ for ‘ftp://’ URIs is deprecated for ‘download.file’ and ‘url’.
‘matrix(x, n,m)’ now warns in more cases where ‘length(x)’ is larger than ‘n * m’; suggested by Abby Spurdle and Wolfgang Huber in Feb. 2021 on the R-devel mailing list.
‘qnbinom(p, size, mu)’ for large ‘size/mu’ is corrected for a range of cases (PR#18095); similarly for the ‘(size, prob)’ parametrization of the negative binomial.
‘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.
‘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.
‘require(pkg, quietly = TRUE)’ is quieter and in particular does not warn if the package is not found.
‘make check-devel’ works again in an R build configured with ‘--without-recommended-packages’.
‘require(pkg, quietly = TRUE)’ is quieter and in particular does not
warn if the package is not found.
‘qnbinom(p, size, mu)’ for large ‘size/mu’ is corrected now for a range of cases (PR#18095); similarly for the ‘(size, prob)’ parametrization of the negative binomial.
‘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.
‘require(pkg, quietly = TRUE)’ is quieter and in particular does not warn if the package is not found.
‘matrix(x, n,m)’ now warns in more cases where ‘length(x)’ is larger than ‘n * m’; suggested by Abby Spurdle and Wolfgang Huber in Feb.2021 on R-devel (mailing list).
‘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 common to all four cases of discrete distributions.
‘qnbinom(p, size, mu)’ for large ‘size/mu’ now warns when it loses
accuracy. We plan to improve it instead (PR#18095).
‘qnbinom(p, size, mu)’ for large ‘size/mu’ now warns when it loses accuracy. We plan to improve it instead (PR#18095).
‘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.
Facilities for accessing ‘ftp://’ sites are no longer tested (except _pro tem_ for ‘curlGetHeaders()’) as browsers are increasing removing support.
It is planned to reduce ‘ftp://’ support in future versions of R to that provided by ‘libcurl’.
‘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.
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.)
‘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.
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.
The _standalone_ ‘libRmath’ math library and R's C API now provide ‘log1pexp()’ again as documented, and gain ‘log1mexp()’.
‘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.
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.)
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).
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)
‘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.
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.
‘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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.)
‘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.
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.
The _standalone_ ‘libRmath’ math library and R's C API now provide
‘log1pexp()’ again as documented, and gain ‘log1mexp()’.
‘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.
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.)
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).
‘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.
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.
‘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.
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.
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.
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).
Facilities for accessing ‘ftp://’ sites are no longer tested (except _pro tem_ for ‘curlGetHeaders()’) as browsers are increasing removing support.
It is planned to reduce ‘ftp://’ support in future versions of R to the provided by ‘libcurl’.
‘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.
The base environment and its namespace are now locked (so one can no longer add bindings to these or remove from these).
New palettes ‘"Rocket"’ and ‘"Mako"’ for ‘hcl.colors()’ (approximating palettes of the same name from the 'viridisLite' package).
Contributed by Achim Zeileis.
‘sprintf’ now warns on arguments unused by the format string.
The R installer can now be optionally built to support a single architecture (only 64-bit or only 32-bit).
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.
‘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).
The ‘split()’ method for class ‘data.frame’ now allows the ‘f’ argument to be specified as a formula.
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.)
‘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).
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.)
‘R CMD build’ removes ‘LazyData’ and ‘LazyDataCompression’ fields from the ‘DESCRIPTION’ file of packages without a ‘data’ directory.
‘R CMD build’ omits tarballs and binaries of previous builds from the top-level package directory. (PR#17828, patch by Sebastian Meyer.)
‘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.)
‘R CMD check’ now runs sanity checks on the use of ‘LazyData’, for example that a ‘data’ directory is present, that ‘LazyDataCompression’ is not specified without ‘LazyData’ or that ‘LazyDataCompression’ is specified with a default 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 (in all CRAN packages tested a non-default method was optimal).
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.
‘grep()’, ‘sub()’, ‘regexp’ and variants work considerably faster for long factors with few levels. (Thanks to Michael Chirico's PR#18063.)
The change to the internal table in R 4.0.4 for ‘iswprint’ has been reverted: it contained some errors in printability of ‘East Asian’ characters.
For packages using ‘LazyData’, ‘R CMD build’ ignored the ‘--resave-data’ option and the ‘BuildResaveData’ field of the ‘DESCRIPTION’ file (in R versions 4.0.0 to 4.0.4).
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.
For packages using ‘LazyData’, ‘R CMD build’ ignored the ‘--resave-data’ option and the ‘BuildResaveData’ field of the ‘DESCRIPTION’ file (in R versions 4.0.0 to 4.0.4).
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.)
‘grep()’, ‘sub()’, ‘regexp’ and variants work considerably faster for long factors with few levels. (Thanks to Michael Chirico's PR#18063.)
‘apply()’ gains a ‘simplify’ argument to allow disabling of simplification of results.
(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 ‘charClass()’ in package ‘utils’ to query the wide-character classification functions in use (such as ‘iswprint’).
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.
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.)
‘str(xS4)’ now also shows extraneous attributes of an S4 object ‘xS4’.
Function ‘package_dependencies()’ (in package ‘tools’) can now use different dependency types for direct and recursive dependencies.
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 simplication 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.)
‘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.)
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.)
Functions ‘URLencode()’ and ‘URLdecode()’ in package ‘utils’ now work on vectors of URIs. (Based on patch from Bob Rudis submitted with PR#17873.)
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.)
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.)
‘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.)
‘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 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. A syntax is also provided for passing the left-hand side as an argument other than the first. 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.
‘.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.)
There is optional support for tracing the progress of ‘loadNamespace()’ - see its help.
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.)
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.
Cairo-based graphics devices on platforms without Pango but with FreeType/FontConfig will make use of the latter for font selection.
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.
‘R CMD build’ now omits tarballs and binaries of previous builds from the top-level package directory. (PR#17828, patch by Sebastian Meyer.)
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.)
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).
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.
‘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.
‘x[[2^31]] <- v’ now works. (Thanks to the report and patch by Suharto Anggono in PR#17330.)
‘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.)
Too long lines in environment files (e.g. ‘Renviron’) no longer crash R. This limit has been increased to 100,000 bytes. (PR#18001.)
‘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.)
The change to the internal table in R 4.0.4 for ‘iswprint’ has been reverted: it contained some errors in printability of ‘East Asian’ characters.
New function ‘charClass()’ in package ‘utils’ to query the wide-character classification functiions in use (such as ‘iswprint’).
(Not Windows.) ‘l10n_info()’ reports an additional element, the name of the encoding as reported by the OS (which may differ from the encodoing 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.
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.
‘grSoftVersion()’ now reports the versions of FreeType and FontConfig
if they are used directly (not _via_ Pango), as is most commonly done
on macOS.
(Not Windows.) ‘l10n_info()’ reports an additional element, the name of the encoding as reported by the OS.
‘grSoftVersion()’ now reports the versions of FreeType and FontConfig if they are used directly (not _via_ Pango), as is most commonly done on macOS.
macOS: Quartz device live drawing could fail (no plot is shown) if the system changes the drawing context after view update (often the case since macOS Big Sur). System log may show "CGContextDelegateCreateForContext: invalid context" error.