Fixing R’s design flaws in a new version of pqR

I’ve released a new version of my pqR implementation of R. This version introduces extensions to the R language that fix some long-standing design flaws that were inherited from S. These language extensions make it easier to write reliable programs, that work even in edge cases, such as data sets with one observation.

In particular, the extensions fix the problems that 1:n doesn’t work as intended when n is zero, and that M[1:n,] is a vector rather than a matrix when n is one, or when M has only one column. Since changing the “:” operator would cause too many problems with existing programs, pqR introduces a new “..” operator for generating increasing sequences.  Unwanted dimension dropping is also addressed in ways that have minimal effects on existing code.

The new release, pqR-2016-06-24, is available at pqR-project-org. The NEWS file for this release also documents some other language extensions, as well as fixes for various bugs (some of which are also in R-3.3.1).