Big package update: assertive is now 16 packages; new pathological also on CRAN

One of the bits of feedback that I got from the useR conference was that my assertive package, for run-time testing of code, was too big. Since then I’ve been working to modularise it, and the results are now on CRAN.

Now, rather than one big package, there are fifteen assertive.* packages for specific pieces of functionality. For example, assertive.numbers contains functionality for checking numeric vectors, assertive.datetimes contains functionality for checking dates and times, and assertive.properties contains functionality for checking names, attributes, and lengths.

This finer grained approach means that if you want to develop a package with assertions, you can choose only the parts that you need, allowing for a much smaller footprint.

The pathological package, which depends upon assertive, gives you an example of how to do this.

The assertive package itself now contains no functions of its own – it merely imports and re-exports the functions from the other 15 packages. This means that if you are working with assertive interactively, you can still simply type library(assertive) and have access to all the functionality.