Skip to main content

v0.0.6

· 2 min read
John Coene
John Coene
Creator of Vapour

Bug fixes galore and a first major change.

Bug fixes​

You can take a look at the changelog and the release to get a full view of the fixes.

The bugs are mainly oversights on my part and trying/hoping that the tree-walker/type checking can be stricter: some of the constraints in place were erroneous. Thanks to Elian Hugh for raising many of them.

NA type​

The na type is gone.

I'm not a fan of NA in R, I know it's one of its strength but it can throw things off sometimes, so my initial thought (and what's in the initial release of Vapour) is to have an na type such that we have to be explicit when a vector may contain NA values.

Oh boy was that wrong...

Thanks to Jonathan Carroll and Lukas Jung we have a better understanding of how this should work, though of course the night is still young and things may change in the future.

You can go through #62, it's a good read if you're a nerd.

In brief, Lukas points out the following in R:

length(letters) # 26

letters[27] # NA

This really can't be handled at build time since the length of the vector can only be known at run time, therefore any vector can technically return NA.

Then Jonathan correctly hints at the fact that NA is not really a type in R, it's a special value. This missing value can have a type, e.g.: NA_character_.

Therefore, the na type has been removed.

Thanks again to anyone who helped improve the project!