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> R will often do something instead of explicitly failing.

I mentioned exception handling above, but this is more specifically the problem.

I think it's a hard problem to solve, because the behaviour of older libraries is so varied.

I have sometimes thought that something like a try catch wrapper which pattern matched or tested the value returned would be useful.



I have noodled on this problem a bit in https://github.com/hadley/strict, which I'm contemplating bringing back to life over the coming year. It's certainly very difficult to cover 100% of all possible problems, but I suspect we can get good coverage of the most common failure points (specifically around recycling and coercion) with a decent amount of work.




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