R 4.4.1

R is a development environment and programming language for statistical and data analysis purposes. It was originally designed by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman (hence the name R) at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Programming in R is strongly object-oriented and the functionality can be expanded via packages that are made available via Cran, among others. The R-core team, which is currently engaged in further development, has released version 4.4.1 with the title Race for Your Life. The changelog of this release looks as follows:

C-Level Facilities:

• Functions R_atof and R_strtod declared in header R_ext/Utils.h are now documented in 'Writing R Extensions' and so formally part of the API.
• The non-API entry points Rf_setSVector, Rf_StringFalse, Rf_StringTrue and Rf_isBlankString have been added to those reported by R CMD check.
• The new function Rf_allocLang is now available. This provides an alternative to the idiom of calling Rf_allocList followed by SET_TYPEOF.

Utilities:

• R CMD check now reports as warnings what gfortran calls 'Fortran 2018 deleted features', all of which have long been marked as 'obsolescent' and some of which were deleted in Fortran 2008 or earlier. Fortran compilers are no longer required to support these.

Bug Fixes:

• as.numeric(), scan(), type.convert() and other places which use the internal C function R_strtod now require a _non-empty_ digit sequence in a decimal or binary exponent. This aligns with the C/POSIX standard for strtod and with ?NumericConstants.
• as.data.frame(m, make.names=NA) now works correctly for a matrix m with NA's in row names.
• The error message from [[“hour”]] and similar now mentions * [[, “hour”]], as wished for in PR#17409 and proposed by Michael Chirico.
• qbinom() and potentially qpois(), qnbinom(), no longer sometimes fail accurate inversion (of pbinom(), etc), thanks to Christopher Chang's report and patch in PR#18711.
• The internal help server on Windows can again serve requests sent in quick succession, fixing a regression in R 4.4.0.
• debugcall(()) now also works when a corresponding S4-generic version is in the methods cache (PR#18143).
• Package tools' toTitleCase(ch0) now returns character (0) when ch0 is of zero length; fixing PR#18724, reported by David Hugh Jones.
• R CMD check is no longer broken (without a check result and no explanation in 00check.log) for a package which declares an invalid VignetteBuilder in DESCRIPTION but has no vignettes.