[datatable-help] v1.6 has been submitted to CRAN

[Matthew Dowle]

(but it seems that CRAN incoming is queued up for over a week so might
not make it to CRAN for a while...)


NEW FEATURES

   o    data.table now plays nicely with S4 classes. Slots can be
        defined to be S4 objects, S4 classes can inherit from   
        data.table, and S4 function dispatch works on data.table 
        objects. See the tests in inst/tests/test-S4.R, and from
        the R prompt: ?"data.table-class"

   o    merge.data.table now works more like merge.data.frame:
        (i) suffixes are consistent with merge.data.frame; existing 
        users may set options(datatable.pre.suffixes=TRUE) for backwards
        compatibility.
        (ii) support for 'by' argument added (FR #1315).
        However, X[Y] syntax is preferred; some users never use merge.
  

BUG FIXES

   o    by=key(DT) now works when the number of rows is not
        divisible by the number of groups (#1298, an odd bug).
        Thanks to Steve Lianoglou for reporting.
        
   o    Combining i and by where i is logical or integer subset now
        works, fixing bug #1294. Thanks to Johann Hibschman for
        contributing a new test.
   
   o    Variable scope inside [[...]] now works without a workaround
        required. This can be useful for looking up which function 
        to call based on the data e.g. DT[,fns[[fn]](colA),by=ID].
        Thanks to Damian Betebenner for reporting.
        
   o    Column names in self joins such as DT[DT] are no longer
        duplicated, fixing bug #1340. Thanks to Andreas Borg for
        reporting.
        

USER-VISIBLE CHANGES

   o    Additions and updates to FAQ vignette. Thanks to Dennis
        Murphy for his thorough proof reading.
        
   o    Welcome to Steve Lianoglou who joins the project
        contributing S4-ization, testing using testthat, and more.
        
   o    IDateTime is now linked from ?data.table. data.table users
        unaware of IDateTime, please do take a look. Tom added
        IDateTime in v1.5 (see below).