Software update: R 4.2.3

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 involved in further development, recently released version 4.2.3 released titled Shortstop Beagle. The changelog for this release looks like this:

C level facilities:

• The definition of DL_FUNC in R_ext/Rdynload.h has been changed to be fully C-compliant. This means that functions loaded _via_ for example R_GetCCallable need to be cast to an appropriate type if they have any arguments.
• .Machine has a new element sizeof.time_t to identify old systems with a 32-bit type and hence a limited range of date-times (and limited support for dates millions of years from present).

Package installation:

• (Windows) The default C++ standard had accidentally been left at C++11 when it was changed to C++14 on Unix.

Bug fixes:

• As “POSIXlt” objects may be “partially filled” and their list components meant to be recycled, length() now is the length of the longest component.
• as.POSIXlt.Date() could underflow for dates in the far past (more than half a million years BCE).
• as.Date.POSIXlt(x) would return “1970-01-01” instead of NA in R 4.2.2, eg, for
  x <- as.POSIXlt(c("2019-01-30","2001-1-1"))
  x$mon <- c(0L, NA); as.Date(x)
• R CMD check failed to apply enabled _R_CHECK_SUGGESTS_ONLY_ to examples and vignettes (regression in R 4.2.0).
• R CMD check did not re-build vignettes in separate processes by default (regression in R 4.2.0).
• Running examples from HTML documentation now restores previous knitr settings and options (PR#18420).
• Quartz: fonts are now located using Core Graphics API instead of deprecated ATS which is no longer supported in the macOS 13 SDK (PR#18426). This also addresses an issue where the currently used font in the Quartz device context was not correctly retained.
• (Windows) Math symbols in text drawing functions are again rendered correctly (PR#18440). This fixes a regression in R 4.2.1 caused by a fix in PR#18382 which uncovered an issue in GraphApp due to which the symbol charset was not used with TT Symbol font face.
• (Windows) Installing a package with a src/Makefile. {win,ucrt} file includes ~/.R/Makevars.win64 in the search for user makevars, as documented in “R Installation and Administration” and done for packages with a src/Makevars. {win,ucrt} file.
• format(, “….%OS”) with n > 0 no longer accidentally uses the unbalanced seconds, thanks to Suharto Anggono’s report (including patch) in PR#18448.
• solve.default(a, b) works around issues with some versions of LAPACK when a contains NA or NaN values.
• When UseMethod() cannot dispatch, it no longer segfaults producing the error message in case of a long class(), thanks to Joris Vankerschaver’s report (including patch) in PR#18447.
• When example(foo, ..) produces graphics on an interactive device it needs to open itself, it now leaves devAskNewPage() unchanged even when it was FALSE, thus fixing a 14 years old ”.
• packageDescription() again catches errors from encoding conversions. This also fixes broken packageVersion() in C locale on systems where iconv does not support transliteration.