Question

Is it possible to have a the software ignore the fact that there are unused arguments defined when a module is run?

For example, I have a module multiply(a,b), which returns the product of a and b. I will receive an error if I call the module like so:

multiply(a=20,b=30,c=10)

Returning an error on this just seems a bit unnecessary, since the required inputs a and b have been specified. Is it possible to avoid this bad behaviour?

An easy solution would be just to stop specifying c, but that doesn’t answer why R behaves like this. Is there another way to solve this?

Answer 1

Change the definition of multiply to take additional unknown arguments:

multiply <- function(a, b, ...) {
  # Original code
}