R News and Updates

[bryangoodrich]

O.O

I like!!!!

[trinker]

I liked this video even more: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=o2B5yJeEl1A

[trinker]

I meant to put up yesterday's webinar on data mining here and almost forgot to go myself. Anyway here are the slides and the video of the webinar:

slides
video

[TheEcologist]

To add to Trinkers webinar;

http://datatable.r-forge.r-project.org/JimHoltman.pdf

P.S. There should be a new free webinar every 14th of the month!

[trinker]

New version of R released (version 2.15.3) http://www.r-bloggers.com/r-2-15-3-is-released/

[bryangoodrich]

So is the next version going to be 3.x.y??

[trinker]

Yes and knitr will integrate with it more deeply (knitr already dropped the Sweave stuff) and will be able to write vignettes in Rmarkdown without hacking the system.

[bryangoodrich]

Nice. I wonder what's next for RStudio, too, as it's obviously going to become the de facto R IDE.

[trinker]

Ther reports package I've been working on basically positions it as such

[Dason]

So is the next version going to be 3.x.y??

3.0.0 to be precise

I'm looking forward to it due to the knitr support for vignettes but also for the support of long vectors: http://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/doc/html/NEWS.html

Yes and knitr will integrate with it more deeply (knitr already dropped the Sweave stuff) and will be able to write vignettes in Rmarkdown without hacking the system.

What exactly did you mean by 'knitr already dropped the Sweave stuff'?

[trinker]

The compatibility (makes knitr faster) obviously it's running sweave under the hood but:

- (IMPORTANT) the internal compatibility with Sweave has been dropped
as scheduled in the last version, and the **knitr** parser was greatly
simplified accordingly; Sweave users can call the function `Sweave2knitr()`
to convert old Rnw files to **knitr** files before running `knit()`

[Dason]

Oh I missed that in the news file...

I wouldn't say that this is knitr integrating more deeply with R. This is just R finally allowing different engines to process vignettes than just Sweave - so really it's just that R isn't going to be as tightly integrated with Sweave.

[trinker]

Release plans: R-3.0.1 on May 16

We intend to have a patch release version on May 16. The nickname will be "Good Sport".

[trinker]

R-3.0.1 Released:

A few changes:

Spoiler:

CHANGES IN R 3.0.1:

NEW FEATURES:

o chooseCRANmirror() and chooseBioCmirror() gain an ind argument
(like setRepositories()).

o mcparallel has a new argument mc.interactive which can modify the
interactive flag in the child process. The new default is FALSE
which makes child processes non-interactive by default (this
prevents lock-ups due to children waiting for interactive input).

o scan() now warns when end-of-file occurs within a quoted string.

o count.fields() is now consistent with scan() in its handling of
newlines in quoted strings. Instead of triggering an error, this
results in the current line receiving NA as the field count, with
the next line getting the total count of the two lines.

o The default method of image() will plot axes of the class of xlim
and ylim (and hence of x and y if there is a suitable range()
method). Based on a suggestion of Michael Sumner.

o load() now has a verbose argument for debugging support, to print
the names of objects just before loading them.

o When loading a serialized object encounters a reference to a
namespace which cannot be loaded, this is replaced by a reference
to the global environment, with a warning.

o pairs() gains a line.main option for title placement.

o The remaining instances in which serialization to a raw vector
was limited to 2GB have been unlimited on a 64-bit platform, and
in most cases serialization to a vector of more than 1GB will be
substantially faster.

UTILITIES:

o R CMD config now make use of personal Makevars files under ~/.R
and a site file Makevars.site, in the same way as R CMD SHLIB and
R CMD INSTALL. This makes the utility more useful in package
configure scripts.

On Windows finding the personal files may require the environment
variable HOME set.

The old behaviour can be obtained with the new options
--no-user-files and --no-site-files.

PACKAGE INSTALLATION:

o Alternatives to the site and user customization files
Makevars.site and ~/.R/Makevars can be specified _via_ the
environment variables R_MAKEVARS_SITE and R_MAKEVARS_USER
respectively. These can be used to suppress the use of the
default files by setting an empty value (where possible) or a
non-existent path.

BUG FIXES:

o sys.source() did not report error locations when keep.source =
TRUE.

o as.POSIXct.numeric was coercing origin using the tz argument and
not "GMT" as documented (PR#14973).

o The active binding to assign fields in reference classes has been
cleaned up to reduce dependence on the class' package
environment, also fixing bug in initializing read-only fields
(inspired by a report from Hadley Wickham).

o str(d) no longer gives an error when names(d) contain illegal
multibyte strings (PR#15247).

For more: https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-ann...13/000563.html