Allow type override in := when i is just order()

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#2,925 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
45/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
r
Domain
data

Research direction

Start by reproducing the two data.table examples in the issue and compare how := handles a non-empty order-only i expression. Locate the relevant := update path and add a regression test showing that assigning paste0(a) after order(-a) no longer raises the type-override error.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

feature request
DT = data.table(a = 1:10)
DT[order(-a), a := paste0(a)]

This errors saying we should be explicit about type overrides, but:

DT[ , a := paste0(a)]

This code works fine (and is of course identical, but the same problem arises when the column update is order-dependent). Presumably this is because when i is non-empty, := suspects there could be a type collision if assigning a new type to a subset of rows.

But order queries in i are incapable of subsetting, so I would expect the behavior to be identical.

Dominant language
R
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