Improve precision/helpfulness of "at an earlier point" error message for selfrefok miss
Nobody has claimed this yet.
Assessment
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Newbie friendliness
- 35/100
Research direction
Start with src/assign.c around line 526 and read the linked discussion in pull request #6419, including the notes about R's shallow_duplicate(). Compare this error with the similar message added by #6419; done means the selfrefok miss explains the likely cause more precisely and gives users clearer guidance.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Description
@HughParsonage flagged that telling user "at an earlier point" "something happened" is not the most helpful error to see:
https://github.com/Rdatatable/data.table/pull/6419#discussion_r1735815154
#6419 adds a similar message in a different place. As pointed out by @aitap, the root cause (IINM in both cases) is R doing a shallow_duplicate(): https://github.com/Rdatatable/data.table/pull/6419#discussion_r1755333034
I believe that means there's no real way for us to fully prevent the user from getting their table into a broken state (which would make sense as a reason why we wanted to start tracking .internal.selfref in the first place long ago).
But armed with a more precise understanding of the underlying issue, we can probably give the user an easier time understanding what's gone wrong & what to do about it.
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