Linter for partially matched arguments

[MichaelChirico]

In topepo/caret#1361, I came across a lot of partially-matched argument calls, especially seq(along= and seq(length= (should be seq(along.with= and seq(length.out=), respectively).

It would be good to have a linter for this. This will require having function definitions loaded, in which case we can use match.call() with options(warnPartialMatchArgs=TRUE) set to check for issues:

c <- substitute(seq(along = x))
options(warnPartialMatchArgs = TRUE, warn=2L)
tryCatch(math.call(seq, c), error=\(c) "lint")
#  [1] "lint"

The key is resolving seq generically for any call name in the linted code.

[MichaelChirico]

Some exploratory code for potential implementation:

xml = source_expression$full_xml_parsed_content
all_call_expr = xml_find_all(xml, "//SYMBOL_FUNCTION_CALL/parent::expr/parent::expr")
# xml2lang() still not robust enough to generically convert <expr>...</expr> --> lang
all_call_lang = Filter(length, lapply(all_call_expr, \(x) tryCatch(xml2lang(x), error=\(c) NULL))
# drop primitives, e.g. match.call(c, quote(c(1))) fails; also no hope to resolve all calls generally,
#   e.g. nested / anonymous functions, so just skip those
all_calls=Filter(\(e) tryCatch(!is.primitive(eval(e[[1]])), error=\(c) FALSE), all_calls)
lapply(all_calls, \(e) match.call(eval(e[[1]]), e))

[MichaelChirico]

codetools::checkUsage() can be used for partially matched arguments at least:

foo <- function() lm(Sepal.Width ~ Sepal.Length, d=iris)
codetools::checkUsage(foo, suppressPartialMatchArgs=FALSE)
# <anonymous>: warning in lm(Sepal.Width ~ Sepal.Length, d = iris): partial argument match of 'd' to 'data'

R CMD check already does so, so this won't help to find issues in CRAN packages, but can still help for real-time linting during development.