An Example of Shortening R Code

While I was answering a question from a user last week, I saw a piece of code that, in my opinion, could be shortened. What it does is to set two chunk options, message and warning, to NA or FALSE according the version of the evaluate package.

setHook(packageEvent("knitr", "onLoad"),
        function(...) {
          message_default <- FALSE
          installed <- installed.packages()
          if ("evaluate" %in% rownames(installed)) {
            evaluate_installed <- installed["evaluate",]
            evaluate_version <- evaluate_installed[["Version"]]
            evaluate_version <- package_version(evaluate_version)
            if (evaluate_version == package_version("0.19")) {
              message("evaluate version 0.19 is broken - there is no way to get log messages out")
            }
            if (evaluate_version >= package_version("0.20")) {
              message_default <- NA
            }
          }
          knitr::opts_chunk$set(message = message_default, warning = message_default)
          knitr::opts_hooks$set(message = function(options) {
            options$message = message_default 
            options$warning = message_default
            options
          })
        })

There is nothing wrong with the code. I’d actually call it professional. For example, it carefully checks if the evaluate package is installed, finds its version number, and sets options conditionally.

My own coding style is that I prefer using shorter variable names (single letters if possible) inside a function if the function is relatively short. I know most programmers would frown upon single-letter variables, but I do not think they are that bad when the context is short—you can quickly learn what x or y is. In a short function, you will not have many variables.

In the above example, variable names are self-explanatory, such as evaluate_installed, evaluate_version, and message_default. I’m a little slow to read these verbose names, though. Here is how I’d write the code:

setHook(
  packageEvent('knitr', 'onLoad'),
  function(...) {
    v = packageVersion('evaluate')
    if (v == '0.19') message(
      'evaluate v0.19 is broken - there is no way to get log messages out'
    )
    knitr::opts_hooks$set(message = function(options) {
      options$message = options$warning = if (v >= '0.20') NA else FALSE
      options
    })
  }
)

Inside the function, the key variable is the version number, which I named v. I wonder if it is difficult for readers to remember that v denotes the version number. It is the only variable inside this function.

However, the length of variable names is not the main factor that affects the length of the code. The code was shortened based on some assumptions and knowledge:

There is no need to check if evaluate was installed, because it is a hard dependency of knitr. As long as knitr is installed and can be loaded, evaluate is guaranteed to be available.
We can get the version number from packageVersion() instead of retrieving it from installed.packages().
A version number can be compared with a string directly if the string can be coerced to a version number (e.g., v == '0.19' or v >= '0.20'). There is no need to coerce it explicitly with package_version(). R will try to coerce the string automatically when it is compared to a version number.

If you want to further shorten the code, it is definitely possible, but I’m afraid it will become “ninja code”, e.g.,

    knitr::opts_hooks$set(message = function(o) {
      o$message = o$warning = v >= '0.20' && NA
      o
    })

The variable options was renamed to a single-letter o above, and the expression if (v >= '0.20') NA else FALSE was changed to v >= '0.20' && NA. The latter change may take you a few seconds to digest (hint: FALSE && NA is FALSE, and TRUE && NA is NA).

Yihui Xie 2023-10-09