R version 4.3.0 was released on Friday. Here are my highlights from the release notes.

The pipe evolves

As an experimental feature the placeholder _ can now also be used in the rhs of a forward pipe |> expression as the first argument in an extraction call […]

It’s fantastic to see base R’s pipe evolve further. This is something that had bothered me a lot personally, not being able to extract for example list elements in a pipe chain easily. But now we (experimentally) can:

lm(mpg ~ wt, data = mtcars) |> _$coef[2] |> round(2)

##    wt 
## -5.34

Date ergonomics

as.POSIXct(<numeric>) and as.POSIXlt(.) (without specifying origin) now work. So does as.Date(<numeric>).

If you have ever had to convert epoch numbers into dates or datetimes (maybe because your dates lost their class for some reason, or otherwise), this should save you the trouble of remembering (and typing out) that the Unix epoch starts on January 1, 1970:

as.Date(0)

## [1] "1970-01-01"

The as.POSIXlt(<POSIXlt>) and as.POSIXct(<POSIXct>) default methods now do obey their tz argument, also in this case.

I was very recently confused by these functions ignoring tz, so I’m pleased to see this now works:

as.POSIXct(Sys.time(), "America/New_York")

## [1] "2023-04-23 06:34:24 EDT"

Logical safety

Calling && or || with LHS or (if evaluated) RHS of length greater than one is now always an error […]

This has been a while coming, but should now clearly catch a class of errors caused by accidentally using a vector in an if statement:

if (LETTERS == "A" || LETTERS == "B") {}

## Error in LETTERS == "A" || LETTERS == "B": 'length = 26' in coercion to 'logical(1)'

Upcoming OOP

The @ operator is now an S3 generic. Based on contributions by Tomasz Kalinowski in PR#18482.

This may seem a bit mysterious at first glance. However, it’s one of the steps paving the way for the upcoming S7 object-oriented programming system. S7 is looking great, and I’m glad to see progress being made for its release with this and other updates.

Bonus

Added new unit prefixes “R” and “Q” for abbreviating (unrealistically large) sizes beyond 10271027 in standard = "SI", thanks to Henrik Bengtsson’s PR#18435.

I don’t know if R ended up being the first programming language to implement these new SI prefixes (as aspired to in Henrik’s PR), but I found this delightful.

print(structure(4.3e27, class = "object_size"), units = "auto", standard = "SI")

## 4.3 RB

Fin

And that’s it from my prespective. These were just my highlights, and there is of course a lot more to be seen in the full release notes. My thanks go out to R Core and all the contributors for continuing to make R better for all of us with yet another great release.