This blog is updated daily.
A general description is here.
Serialization format version 3 becomes the default for serialization and saving of the workspace (‘save()’, ‘serialize()’, ‘saveRDS()’, ‘compiler::cmpfile()’). Serialized data in format 3 cannot be read by versions of R prior to version 3.5.0. Serialization format version 2 is still supported and can be selected by ‘version = 2’ in the save/serialization functions. The default can be changed back for the whole R session by setting environment variables ‘R_DEFAULT_SAVE_VERSION’ and ‘R_DEFAULT_SERIALIZE_VERSION’ to ‘2’. For maximal back-compatibility, files ‘vignette.rds’ and ‘partial.rdb’ generated by ‘R CMD build’ are in serialization format version 2, and resave by default produces files in serialization format version 2 (unless the original is already in format version 3).
The default method for generating from a discrete uniform distribution (used in ‘sample()’, for instance) has been changed. This addresses the fact, pointed out by Ottoboni and Stark, that the previous method made ‘sample()’ noticeably non-uniform on large populations. See PR#17494 for a discussion. The previous method can be requested using ‘RNGkind()’ or ‘RNGversion()’ if necessary for reproduction of old results. Thanks to Duncan Murdoch for contributing the patch and Gabe Becker for further assistance.
‘Sys.setFileTime()’ has been vectorized so arguments ‘path’ and ‘time’ of length greater than one are now supported.
‘axis()’ gets new option ‘gap.axis = NA’ for specifying a multiplication factor for the minimal “gap” (distance) between axis labels drawn. Its default is ‘1’ for labels _parallel_ to the axis, and ‘0.25’ for perpendicular ones.
Perpendicular labels no longer overlap, fixing bug PR#17384.
The default method of ‘plot()’ gains new arguments ‘xgap.axis = NA’ and ‘ygap.axis = NA’ to be passed to the x- and y- ‘axis(.., gap.axis=*)’ calls.
‘removeSource()’ now works not only for functions but also for some language objects.
‘as.call()’, ‘rep.int()’, ‘rep_len()’ and ‘nchar()’ dispatch internally.
‘is(object, class2)’ looks for ‘class2’ in the calling namespace after looking in the namespace of ‘class(object)’.
‘extendrange(.., f)’ with a length-2 ‘f’ now extends separately to the left and the right.
‘lengths()’ dispatches internally to S4 methods.
‘download.file()’ on Windows now uses ‘URLdecode()’ to determine the file extension, and uses binary transfer (‘mode = "wb"’) also for file extension ‘.rds’.
The help page for ‘download.file()’ now contains the same information on all platforms.
Setting ‘C’ locale for collation _via_ environment variables ‘LC_ALL’ and ‘LC_COLLATE’ and _via_ a call to ‘Sys.setlocale()’ now takes precedence over environment variable ‘R_ICU_LOCALE’.
There is a new function, ‘nullfile()’, to give the file name of the null system device (e.g., ‘/dev/null’) on the current platform.
There are two new options, ‘keep.parse.data’ and ‘keep.parse.data.pkgs’, which control whether parse data are included into sources when ‘keep.source’ or ‘keep.source.pkgs’ is ‘TRUE’. By default, ‘keep.parse.data.pkgs’ is now ‘FALSE’, which changes previous behavior and significantly reduces space and time overhead when sources are kept when installing packages.
In ‘rapply(x, ..)’, ‘x’ can also be “list-like” and of length >= 2^{31}.
‘trimws()’ gets new optional ‘whitespace’ argument, allowing more extensive definitions of “space”, such as including Unicode spaces (as wished in PR#17431).
‘weighted.mean()’ no longer coerces the weights to a double/numeric vector, since ‘sum()’ now handles integer overflow. This makes ‘weighted.mean()’ more polymorphic and endomorphic, but be aware that the results are no longer guaranteed to be a vector of type ‘double’.
When loading namespaces, S3 method registrations which overwrite previous registrations are now noted by default (using ‘packageStartupMessage()’).
‘compiler::cmpfile()’ gains a ‘version’ argument, for use when the output file should be saved in serialization format 2.
The axis labeling in the default method of ‘pairs()’ may now be toggled by new options ‘horOdd’ and ‘verOdd’.
(Not Windows nor macOS.) Package ‘tcltk’ now supports an environment variable ‘R_DONT_USE_TK’ which if set disables Tk initialization. This is intended for use to circumvent errors in loading the package, e.g. with recent Linux running under an address sanitizer.
The ‘numeric’ method of ‘all.equal()’ gets optional arguments ‘countEQ’ and ‘formatFUN’. If ‘countEQ’ is true, the mean error is more sensible when many entries are *eq*ual.
‘outer(x,y, FUN = "*")’ is more efficient using ‘tcrossprod(u,v)’ instead of ‘u %*% t(v)’.
‘vcov(<mlm>)’ is more efficient via new optional arguments in ‘summary.mlm()’.
The default method of ‘summary()’ gets an option to choose the _kind_ of ‘quantile()’s to use; wish of PR#17438.
Fitting multiple linear models _via_ ‘lm()’ does work with _matrix_ offsets, as suggested in PR#17407.
The new functions ‘mem.maxVSize()’ and ‘mem.maxMSize()’ allow the maximal size of the vector heap and the maximal number of nodes allowed in the current ‘R’ process to be queried and set.
‘news()’ gains support for ‘NEWS.md’ files.
An effort has been started to have our reference manuals, i.e., all help pages. show platform-independent information (rather than Windows or Unix-alike specifics visible only on that platform). Consequently, the Windows version of ‘X11()’ / ‘x11()’ got identical formal arguments to the Unix one.
‘sessionInfo()$running’ has been factored out in a new variable ‘osVersion’.
‘slice.index()’ now also works for multi-dimensional margins.
‘untar()’ used with an external ‘tar’ command assumes this supports decompression including ‘xz’ and automagically detecting the compression type. This has been true of all mainstream implementations since 2009 (for GNU ‘tar’, since version 1.22): older implementations are still supported _via_ the new argument ‘support_old_tars’ whose default is controlled by environment variable ‘R_SUPPORT_OLD_TARS’. (It looks like NetBSD and OpenBSD have ‘older’ ‘tar’ commands for this purpose.)
The new function ‘asplit()’ allow splitting an array or matrix by its margins.
New functions ‘errorCondition()’ and ‘warningCondition()’ provide a convenient way to create structured error and warning objects.
‘.Deprecated()’ now signals a warning of class ‘"deprecatedWarning"’, and ‘.Defunct()’ now signals an error of class ‘"defunctError"’.
Many ‘package not found’ errors are now signaled as errors of class ‘"packageNotFoundError"’.
As an experimental feature, when ‘loadNamespace()’ fails because the requested package is not available the error is initially signaled with a ‘retry_loadNamespace’ restart available. This allows a calling handler to try to install the package and continue.
‘S3method()’ directives in ‘NAMESPACE’ can now also be used to perform _delayed_ S3 method registration.
Experimentally, setting environment variable ‘_R_CHECK_LENGTH_1_LOGIC2_’ will lead to warnings (or errors if the variable is set to a ‘true’ value) when ‘&&’ or ‘||’ encounter and use arguments of length more than one.
Added ‘"lines"’ and ‘"chars"’ coordinate systems to ‘grconvertX()’ and ‘grconvertY()’.
‘getOption()’ is more efficient notably for the rare case when called with two arguments, from several contributors in PR#17394.
In ‘.col(dim)’ and ‘.row(dim)’, ‘dim’ now may also be an integer-valued ‘"double"’.
‘sQuote()’ and ‘dQuote()’ get an explicit ‘q’ argument with obvious default instead of using ‘getOption("fancyQuotes")’ implicitly and unconditionally.
‘unzip()’ can list archives with comments and with spaces in file names even using an external ‘unzip’ command.
Command line completion has a new setting ‘rc.settings(dots = FALSE)’ to remove ‘...’ from the list of possible function arguments.
‘library()’ no longer checks packages with compiled code match ‘R.version$platform’. ‘loadNamespace()’ never has, and increasingly the ‘canonical name’ does not reflect the important characteristics of compiled code.
The primitive functions ‘drop()’ and ‘unclass()’ now avoid duplicating their data for atomic vectors that are large enough, by returning ‘ALTREP’ wrapper objects with adjusted attributes. R-level assignments to change attributes will also use wrapper objects to avoid duplicating data for larger atomic vectors. R functions like ‘structure()’ and ‘unname()’ will therefore not duplicate data in these settings. Generic vectors as produced by ‘list()’ are not yet covered by this optimization but may be in due course.
In ‘formals()’, ‘envir’ becomes an optional argument instead of being hardwired.
Instead of signalling an error for an invalid S4 object ‘x’, ‘str(x)’ now gives a warning and subsequently still shows most parts of ‘x’, e.g., when slots are missing.
‘gamma(x)’ and ‘lgamma(x)’ no longer warn when correctly returning ‘Inf’ or underflowing to zero. This helps maximum likelihood and similar computations.
‘convertColor()’ is now vectorized, so a lot faster for converting many colours at once. The new argument ‘vectorized’ to ‘colorConverter()’ ensures that non-vectorized colour converters still work. (Thanks to Brodie Gaslam.)
‘download.file()’ and ‘url()’ get new argument ‘headers’ for custom HTTP headers, e.g., allowing to perform basic http authentication, thanks to a patch contributed by Gábor Csárdi.
File-based connection functions ‘file()’, ‘gzfile()’, ‘bzfile()’ and ‘xzfile()’ now signal an error when used on a directory.
For ‘approx()’, ‘splinefun()’ _etc_, a new setting ‘ties = c("ordered", <fun>)’ allows skipping the sorting and still treat ties.
‘format(x)’ gives a more user friendly error message in the case where no method is defined. A minimal method is provided in ‘format.default(x)’ when ‘isS4(x)’ is true.
‘which(x)’ now also works when ‘x’ is a long vector, thanks to Suharto Anggono's PR#17201. *NB*: this may return a double result, breaking the previous guarantee of an integer result.
‘seq.default()’ is more careful to return an ‘integer’ (as opposed to ‘double’) result when its arguments are large and/or classed objects; see comment #9 of Suharto Anggono's PR#17497.
The ‘plot()’ method for ‘lm’ and ‘glm’ fits, ‘plot.lm()’, gains a new option ‘iter.smooth’ with a default of ‘0’ for binomial fits, no longer down-weighting when smoothing the residuals.
‘zip()’ passes its list of files _via_ standard input to the external command when too long for the command line (on some platforms).
‘data()’ gains an ‘overwrite’ argument.
‘t.test()’ now also returns the standard error (in list component ‘stderr’).
‘model.matrix(*, contrasts.arg = CC)’ now warns about invalid ‘contrasts.arg’s.
Performance of ‘substr()’ and ‘substring()’ has been improved.
‘stopifnot()’ has been simplified thanks to Suharto Anggono's proposals to become considerably faster for cheap expressions.
The default ‘user agent’ has been changed when accessing ‘http://’ and ‘https://’ sites using ‘libcurl’. (A site was found which caused ‘libcurl’ to infinite-loop with the previous default.)
‘sessionInfo()’ now also contains ‘RNGkind()’ and prints it when it differs from the default; based on a proposal and patch by Gabe Becker in PR#17535. Also, ‘RNGversion(getRversion())’ works directly.
‘library()’ and ‘require()’ now allow more control over handling search path conflicts when packages are attached. The policy is controlled by the new ‘conflicts.policy’ option.
‘barplot()’ gets a formula method, thanks to a patch proposal by Arni Magnusson in PR#17521.
‘pmax()’ and ‘pmin(x)’ now also work for long vectors, thanks to Suharto Anggono's PR#17533.
‘bxp()’ now warns when omitting duplicated arguments.
New ‘hcl.colors()’ function to provide wide range of HCL-based colour palettes with much better perceptual properties than existing RGB/HSV-based palettes like ‘rainbow()’.
Also new ‘hcl.pals()’ function to list available palette names for ‘hcl.colors()’.
Contributed by Achim Zeileis.
Default colours for ‘image()’ and ‘filled.contour()’ are now based on ‘hcl.colors()’.
Palette-generating functions ‘rainbow()’, ‘gray.colors()’, etc. get new ‘rev’ argument to facilitate reversing the order of colors.
The options selected for the C++ compiler default to the C++11 standard if supported, otherwise to the C++98 standard.
Visibility macros such as ‘C_VISIBILITY’ can now be user-set (including to empty), e.g. in ‘config.site’.
Macro ‘FCLIBS’, which has sometimes been needed on Solaris, has been renamed to ‘FCLIBS_XTRA’.
Macro ‘F77’ is always set to the value of ‘FC’, so the latter should be set to user-select the Fortran compiler for both fixed-form and free-form Fortran. In particular, ‘gfortran’ is now the first choice for ‘F77’, not ‘f95’.
Macros ‘FFLAGS’ and ‘FCFLAGS’ remain distinct to allow for a compiler which needs a flag to select free- or fixed-form Fortran (most use the source-file extension to choose: ‘.f’ is fixed-form and ‘.f90’ and ‘.f95’ are free-form).
If only one of them is set, its value is used for both.
The special-casing of ‘CFLAGS’, ‘CXXFLAGS’ and ‘FFLAGS’ for Intel compilers on Linux has been removed: we do not have recent experience but the generic defaults now chosen are the same as those previously special-cased for ‘x86_64’.
If necessary, override the defaults on the ‘configure’ command line or in file ‘config.site’.
Long-untested ‘configure’ support for HP-UX and very old versions of Linux has been removed.
‘configure --with-blas’ (without specifying a value) includes OpenBLAS in its search (before ATLAS and a generic BLAS). This follows recent versions of the ‘ax_blas’ autoconf macro.
The ‘configure’ macro ‘MAKEINFO’ has been updated to ‘TEXI2ANY’.
Support for ‘make install’ has been enhanced.
Source package installation is by default ‘staged’: the package is installed into a temporary location under the final library directory and moved into place once the installation is complete. The benefit is that partially-installed packages are hidden from other R sessions.
The overall default is set by environment variable ‘R_INSTALL_STAGED’. ‘R CMD INSTALL’ has new options ‘--staged-install’ and ‘--no-staged-install’, and packages can use the ‘StagedInstall’ field in their ‘DESCRIPTION’ file to opt out. (That opt-out is a temporary measure which may be withdrawn in future.)
Staged installation requires either ‘--pkglock’ or ‘--lock’, one of which is used by default.
The interpretation of source code with extension ‘.f’ is changing. Previously this denoted FORTRAN 77 code, but current compilers no longer have a FORTRAN 77 mode and interpret it as ‘fixed-form’ Fortran 90 (or later where supported) code. Extensions ‘.f90’ and ‘.f95’ continue to indicate ‘free-form’ Fortran code.
Legal FORTRAN 77 code is also legal fixed-form Fortran 9x; however this change legitimizes the use of later features, in particular to replace features marked ‘obsolescent’ in Fortran 95 which ‘gfortran’ 8.x warns about.
Packages containing files in the ‘src’ directory with extensions ‘.f90’ or ‘.f95’ are now linked using the C or C++ compiler rather than the Fortran 9x compiler. This is consistent with fixed-form Fortran code and allows mixing of C++ and free-form Fortran on most platforms.
Consequentially, a package which includes free-form Fortran 9x code which uses OpenMP should include ‘SHLIB_OPENMP_CFLAGS’ (or the ‘CXXFLAGS’ version if they also include C++ code) in ‘PKG_LIBS’ rather than ‘SHLIB_OPENMP_FCFLAGS’ - fortunately on almost all current platforms they are the same flag.
Macro ‘PKG_FFLAGS’ will be used for the compilation of both fixed-form and free-form Fortran code unless ‘PKG_FCFLAGS’ is also set (in ‘src/Makevars’ or ‘src/Makevars.win’).
The make macro ‘F_VISIBILITY’ is now preferred for both fixed-form and free-form Fortran.
‘R CMD INSTALL’ gains a new option ‘--strip’ which strips installed shared object(s): this can also be achieved by setting the environment variable ‘_R_SHLIB_STRIP_’ to a true value.
The new option ‘--strip-lib’ attempts stripping of static and shared libraries installed under ‘lib’.
These are most useful on platforms using GNU ‘binutils’ (such as Linux) and compiling with ‘-g’ flags.
There is more support for installing UTF-8-encoded packages in a strict Latin-1 locale (and probably for other Latin locales): non-ASCII comments in R code are worked around better.
‘R CMD check’ now optionally checks makefiles for correct and portable use of the ‘SHLIB_OPENMP_*FLAGS’ macros.
‘R CMD check’ now evaluates ‘\Sexpr{}’ expressions (including those in macros) before checking the contents of ‘Rd’ files and so detects issues both in evaluating the expressions and in the expanded contents.
‘R CMD check’ now lists missing packages separated by commas and with regular quotes such as to be useful as argument in calling ‘install.packages(c(..))’; from a suggestion by Marcel Ramos.
‘tools::Rd2latex()’ now uses UTF-8 as its default output encoding.
‘R CMD check’ now checks line endings of files with extension ‘.hpp’ and those under ‘inst/include’. The check now includes that a non-empty file is terminated with a newline.
‘R CMD build’ will correct line endings in such files.
‘R CMD check’ now tries re-building all vignettes rather than stopping at the first error: whilst doing so it adds ‘bookmarks’ to the log. By default (see the ‘R Internals’ manual) it re-builds each vignette in a separate process.
It now checks for duplicated vignette titles (also known as ‘index entries’): they are used as hyperlinks on CRAN package pages and so do need to be unique.
‘R CMD check’ has more comprehensive checks on the ‘data’ directory and the functioning of ‘data()’ in a package.
‘R CMD check’ now checks ‘autoconf’-generated ‘configure’ files have their corresponding source files, including optionally attempting to regenerate them on platforms with ‘autoreconf’.
‘R CMD build’ has a new option ‘--compression’ to select the compression used for the tarball.
New pointer protection C functions ‘R_PreserveInMSet’ and ‘R_ReleaseFromMSet’ have been introduced to replace ‘UNPROTECT_PTR’, which is not safe to mix with ‘UNPROTECT’ (and with ‘PROTECT_WITH_INDEX’). Intended for use in parsers only.
‘NAMEDMAX’ has been raised to 7 to allow further protection of intermediate results from (usually ill-advised) assignments in arguments to ‘BUILTIN’ functions. Properly written package code should not be affected.
Argument ‘compressed’ of ‘untar()’ is deprecated - it is only used for external ‘tar’ commands which increasingly for extraction auto-detect compression and ignore their ‘zjJ’ flags.
‘var(f)’ and hence ‘sd(f)’ now give an error for ‘factor’ arguments; they gave a deprecation warning since R 3.2.3, PR#16564.
Package ‘tools’' ‘vignetteDepends()’ has been deprecated (it called a function deprecated since Feb 2016), being partly replaced by newly exported ‘vignetteInfo()’.
The ‘f77_f2c’ script has been removed: it no longer sufficed to compile the ‘.f’ files in R.
The deprecated legacy support of ‘make’ macros such as ‘CXX1X’ has been removed: use the ‘CXX11’ forms instead.
Make macro ‘F77_VISIBILITY’ is deprecated in favour of ‘F_VISIBILITY’.
Make macros ‘F77’, ‘FCPIFCPLAGS’ and ‘SHLIB_OPENMP_FCFLAGS’ are deprecated in favour of ‘FC’, ‘FPICFLAGS’ and ‘SHLIB_OPENMP_FFLAGS’ respectively.
‘$.data.frame’ had become an expensive version of the default method, so has been removed. (Thanks to Radford Neal for picking this up and to Duncan Murdoch for providing a patch.)
‘replayPlot(r)’ now also works in the same R session when ‘r’ has been “reproduced” from serialization, typically after saving to and reading from an RDS file.
‘substr()’ and ‘substring()’ now signal an error when the input is invalid UTF-8.
‘file.copy()’ now works also when its argument ‘to’ is of length greater than one.
‘mantelhaen.test()’ no longer suffers from integer overflow in largish cases, thanks to Ben Bolker's PR#17383.
Calling ‘setGeneric("foo")’ in a package no longer fails when the enclosing environment of the implicit generic ‘foo()’ is ‘.GlobalEnv’.
‘untar(file("<some>.tar.gz"), *)’ now gives a better error message, suggesting to use ‘gzfile()’ instead.
Method dispatch uses more relevant environments when looking up class definitions.
The documentation for ‘identify()’ incorrectly claimed that the indices of identified points were returned in the order that the points were selected. ‘identify()’ now has a new argument ‘order’ to allow the return value to include the order in which points were identified; the documentation has been updated. Reported by Richard Rowe and Samuel Granjeaud.
‘order(...., decreasing=c(TRUE, FALSE))’ could fail in some cases. Reported from StackOverflow via Karl Nordström.
User macros in Rd files now accept empty and multi-line arguments.
Changes in ‘print.*()’, thanks to Lionel Henry's patches in PR#17398:
• Printing lists, pairlists or attributes containing calls with S3 class no longer evaluate those.
• Printing S4 objects within lists and pairlists dispatches with ‘show()’ rather than ‘print()’, as with auto-printing.
• The indexing tags (names or ‘[[<n>]]’) of recursive data structures are now printed correctly in complex cases.
• Arguments supplied to ‘print()’ are now properly forwarded to methods when printing lists, pairlists or attributes containing S3 objects.
• The print parameters are now preserved when printing S3 objects or deparsing symbols and calls. Previously, printing lists containing S3 objects or expressions would reset these parameters.
• Printing lists, pairlists or attributes containing functions now uses ‘srcref’ attributes if present.
Calling ‘install.packages()’ with a length zero ‘pkgs’ argument now is a no-op (PR#17422).
‘unlist(x)’ now returns a correct ‘factor’ when ‘x’ is a nested list with factor leaves, fixing PR#12572 and PR#17419.
The documentation ‘help(family)’ gives more details about the ‘aic’ component, thanks to Ben Bolker's prompting.
The documentation for ‘attributes’ and ‘`attributes<-`’ now gives ‘x’ as name of the first and main argument which the implementation has been requiring, fixing PR#17434. For consistency, the first argument name is also changed from ‘obj’ to ‘x’ for ‘`mostattributes<-`’.
‘strwidth()’ now uses ‘par("font")’ as default font face (PR#17352).
‘plot(<table>, log="x")’ no longer warns about ‘log’.
The ‘print()’ method for ‘"htest"’ objects now formats the test statistic and parameter directly and hence no longer rounds to units _before_ the decimal point. Consequently, printing of ‘t.test()’ results with a small number of digits now shows non-large ‘df’'s to the full precision (PR#17444).
‘kruskal.test()’ and ‘fligner.test()’ no longer erroneously insist on numeric ‘g’ group arguments (PR#16719).
Printing a news db via the browser now does a much better job (PR#17433).
‘print.aov()’ missed column names in the multivariate case due to misspelling (reported by Chris Andrews).
‘axis()’ now creates valid ‘at’ locations also for small subnormal number ranges in log scale plots.
‘format.POSIXlt()’ now also recycles the ‘zone’ and ‘gmtoff’ list components to full length when needed, and its internal C code detects ‘have_zone’ in more cases. In some cases, this changes its output to become compatible with ‘format.POSIXct()’.
On Windows, ‘detectCores()’ in package ‘parallel’ now detects processors in all processor groups, not just the group R is running in (impacts particularly systems with more than 64 logical processors). Reported by Arunkumar Srinivasan.
On Windows, ‘socketSelect()’ would hang with more than 64 sockets, and hence ‘parallel::clusterApplyLB()’ would hang with more than 64 workers. Reported by Arunkumar Srinivasan.
‘as(1L, "double")’ now does coerce (PR#17457).
‘lm.influence()’, ‘influence.measures()’, ‘rstudent()’ etc now work (more) correctly for multivariate models (‘"mlm"’), thanks to (anonymous) stackoverflow remarks.
‘sample.int(2.9, *, replace=TRUE)’ again behaves as documented and as in R < 3.0.0, namely identically to ‘sample.int(2, ..)’.
Fixes to ‘convertColor()’ for chromatic adaptation; thanks to Brodie Gaslam PR#17473.
Using ‘\Sexpr[stage=install]{..}’ to create an ‘Rd’ section no longer gives a warning in ‘R CMD check’; problem originally posted by Gábor Csárdi, then reported as PR#17479 with a partial patch by Duncan Murdoch.
Parse data now include a special node for equal assignment.
‘split.default()’ no longer relies on ‘[[<-()’, so it behaves as expected when splitting an object by a factor with the empty string as one of its levels. Thanks to Brad Friedman for the report.
Line numbers in messages about ‘.Rd’ files are now more reliable, thanks to a patch from Duncan Murdoch.
In the ‘numeric’ method for ‘all.equal()’, a numeric ‘scale’ argument is now checked to be positive and allowed to be of length > 1. (The latter worked originally and with a warning in recent years).
Deferred string conversions now record the ‘OutDec’ option setting when not equal to the default. Reported by Michael Sannella.
When ‘y’ is numeric and ‘f’ a ‘factor’, ‘plot(y ~ f)’ nicely uses "y" and "f" as y- and x-labels. The more direct ‘boxplot(y ~ f)’ now does too. The new argument ‘ann = FALSE’ may be used to suppress these.
Subassignment to no/empty rows of a data frame is more consistent and typically a no-op in all cases instead of sometimes an error; part of Emil Bode's PR#17483.
Calls like ‘formatC(*, zero.print = "< 0.001")’ no longer give an error and are further improved via new optional argument ‘replace.zero’. Reported by David Hugh-Jones.
‘methods::formalArgs("<fn>")’ now finds the same function as ‘formals("<fn>")’, fixing Emil Bode's PR#17499.
The ‘methods’ package better handles duplicated class names across packages.
The default method of ‘seq()’ now avoids integer overflow, thanks to the report and "cumsum" patch of Suharto Anggono's PR#17497.
‘sub()’ no longer loses encodings for non-ASCII replacements (PR#17509).
Fix for rotated raster image on X11 device. (Partial fix for PR#17148; thanks to Mikko Korpela).
‘formula(model.frame(frml, ..))’ now returns ‘frml’ in all cases, thanks to Bill Dunlap. The previous behavior is available as ‘DF2formula(<model.frame>)’.
‘ar.ols()’ also returns scalar ‘var.pred’ in univariate case (PR#17517).
‘normalizePath()’ now treats ‘NA’ path as non-existent and normalizes it to ‘NA’. ‘file.access()’ treats ‘NA’ file name as non-existent. ‘file.edit()’ and connection functions such as ‘file()’ now treat ‘NA’ file names as errors.
The internal ‘regularize.values()’ auxiliary of ‘approx()’, ‘splinefun()’ etc now warns again when there are ties and the caller did not specify ‘ties’. Further, it no longer duplicates ‘x’ and ‘y’ unnecessarily when ‘x’ is already sorted (PR#17515).
‘strtoi("", base)’ now gives ‘NA’ on all platforms, following its documentation. Reported by Michael Chirico.
In the definition of an S4 class, prototype elements are checked against the slots of the class, with giving a prototype for an undefined slot now being an error. (Reported by Bill Dunlap.)
From ‘setClassUnion()’, if environment variable ‘_R_METHODS_SHOW_CHECKSUBCLASSES’ is set to true, the internal ‘.checkSubclasses()’ utility prints debugging info to see where it is used.
‘max.col(m)’ with an ‘m’ of zero columns now returns integer ‘NA’ (instead of ‘1’).
‘axTicks()’ no longer returns small “almost zero” numbers (in exponential format) instead of zero, fixing Ilario Gelmetti's PR#17534.
‘isSymmetric(matrix(0, dimnames=list("A","b")))’ is ‘FALSE’ again, as always documented.
The ‘cairo_pdf’ graphics device (and other Cairo-based devices) now clip correctly to the right and bottom border.
There was an off-by-one-pixel bug, reported by Lee Kelvin.
‘as.roman(3) <= 2:4’ and all other comparisons now work, as do group ‘"Summary"’ function calls such as ‘max(as.roman(sample(20)))’ and ‘as.roman(NA)’. (Partly reported by Bill Dunlap in PR#17542.)
‘reformulate("x", response = "sin(y)")’ no longer produces extra back quotes, PR#17359, and gains new optional argument ‘env’.
When Reading console input from ‘stdin’ with re-encoding (‘R --encoding=enc < input’) the code on a Unix-alike now ensures that each converted input line is terminated with a newline even if re-encoding fails.
Class unions are unloaded when their namespace is unloaded (PR#17531, adapted from a patch by Brodie Gasla).
‘selectMethod()’ is robust to ANY-truncation of method signatures (thanks to Herve Pages for the report).