local package delays

When Jean-Michel and I left Berlin, a month ago, I really thought we were that close to sending the new edition of Bayesian Core. Alas, we are not done yet for a series of reasons: leaving for India did not give me enough time to complete the help manual, some codes from the original version did not seem to work any longer, apparently jeopardising a whole chapter!, and the package did not seem to compile. Yesterday, we met again and made progress that makes me much more confident. For one thing, the R code that “did not work” was an original spreadsheet of Bayesian Core that we turned into functions towards the completion of the bayess package. However, due to sloppy programming at the time, we had used global variables that were called inside functions without being (explicitly) declared as variables. When those R codes got turned into functions, variables defined inside those functions were no longer global and recognised by the other functions defined within those same functions… Silly me! Once this issue got spotted by Jean-Michel, as well as the use of a few && instead of &’s, the whole problem unravelled rather quickly and we got a compiled package by the end of the day, even though some of the demos (reproducing the outcome found in the text) are still bugged. Stay tuned!