dot alias not understood as expected in by/keyby

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#2,447 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
r
Domain
data

Research direction

Start with the reproducible DT[...] examples and inspect the [.data.table evaluation paths for by/keyby and j. Compare how . is handled in each context, then add regression coverage showing that the by expression evaluates consistently with the working j example.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

consistency

I think there are a couple of issues on similar fronts addressing that we should be more consistent about how/when . is understood in data.table and more specifically within [.data.table calls. Here's a new one I came across today:

DT = data.table(a = 1:10, b = 10:1)
DT[ , mean(b), by = {
  a2 = a^2
  .(a2mod5 = a2 %% 5)
}]

This returns an error since evaluation looks for the . function (i.e., the call has not replaced . with list) (replacing . with list, this evaluates as expected):

Error in .(b2mod5 = b2%%5) : could not find function "."

Contrast this to something similar in j:

DT = data.table(a = 1:10, b = 10:1)
DT[ , {
  b2 = b^2
  .(b2mod5 = sum(b2 %% 5))
}, by = a %% 3]
#    a b2mod5
# 1: 1      6
# 2: 2      6
# 3: 0      8

Some related issues: #2391, #1912, #852, a few others I can't find just now

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