Error when running tests and examples

[ajinkya-k]

Hello!

This package has really helped me understand how estimation in lme4 works and I really appreciate the effort put in. I have been trying to run the tests and examples in this package and keep getting the same error:

Error in as.character(sys.call(sys.parent())[[1L]]) : 
  cannot coerce type 'closure' to vector of type 'character'

More specifically, I get this error when running:

• tests/pls.R on line 9: ll <- plsform(form, data = sleepstudy, REML=FALSE, sparseX = F)
• the example in documentation for lmer.fit

I investigated a little bit and figured out that this error comes from the mkRanefStructures call, and within that from the do.call(rBind, ZtSections) call in both cases.

Since the traceback() output is really long I attached a file (traceback.log) containing the output with this issue.
traceback.log

I realize this could simply be because there was a breaking change somewhere in the litany of packages (or R itself) that is causing this, but I would appreciate if you could help me figure out the error and fix it.

Session info:

R version 4.3.3 (2024-02-29)
Platform: aarch64-apple-darwin20 (64-bit)
Running under: macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

Matrix products: default
BLAS:   /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.3-arm64/Resources/lib/libRblas.0.dylib 
LAPACK: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.3-arm64/Resources/lib/libRlapack.dylib;  LAPACK version 3.11.0

locale:
[1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8

time zone: America/Chicago
tzcode source: internal

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
[1] lme4_1.1-35.3    minqa_1.2.6      lme4pureR_0.1-0  Matrix_1.6-5    
[5] colorout_1.3-0.2

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] desc_1.4.3      R6_2.5.1        lattice_0.22-6  splines_4.3.3  
 [5] remotes_2.5.0   ps_1.7.6        cli_3.6.2       processx_3.8.4 
 [9] callr_3.7.6     nloptr_2.0.3    grid_4.3.3      compiler_4.3.3 
[13] boot_1.3-30     tools_4.3.3     pkgbuild_1.4.4  curl_5.2.1     
[17] nlme_3.1-164    Rcpp_1.0.12     rlang_1.1.3     jsonlite_1.8.8 
[21] MASS_7.3-60.0.1

[ajinkya-k]

Okay so figured out that the issue occurs because the rBind function in Matrix has been deprecated, which was causing the issue as mentioned in #10 . I replaced all calls to rBind with the base function rbind and the error was resolved!

Happy to submit a pull request. Let me know what you all think.