masking

Short version For those that don't want to read through my "case", this is the essence: What is the recommended way of minimizing the chances of new packages breaking existing code, i.e. of making the code you write as robust as possible ? What is the recommended way of making the best use of the namespace mechanism when a) just using contributed packages (say in just some R Analysis Project)? b) with respect to developing own packages? How best to avoid conflicts with respect to formal classes (mostly Reference Classes in my case) as there isn't even a namespace mechanism comparable to :: for

I wanted to create a barplot in which the bars were ordered by height rather than alphabetically by category. This worked fine when the only package I loaded was ggplot2. However, when I loaded a few more packages and ran the same code that created, sorted, and plotted my data frame, the bars had reverted to being sorted alphabetically again. I checked the data frame each time using str() and it turned out that the attributes of the data frame were now different, even though I'd run the same code each time. My code and output are listed below. Can anyone explain the differing behavior? Why

I am trying to mask what the user types into IDLE with asterisks so people around them can't see what they're typing/have typed in. I'm using basic raw input to collect what they type. key = raw_input('Password :: ') Ideal IDLE prompt after user types password: Password :: ********** Michael L Depending on the OS, how you get a single character from user input and how to check for the carriage return will be different. See this post: Python read a single character from the user On OSX, for example, you could so something like this: import sys, tty, termios def getch(): fd = sys.stdin.fileno()