How do hidden variables behave in R?

Are there any significant [1] reasons not to export functions with form names. fnname

in R packages?

I understand that the main use of prefix prefixes is to mark a variable as hidden when searched in the environment using functions such as ls

, and to indicate that fields in an object or list should be treated as private as an S4.Data field.

test_env           <- new.env(parent = emptyenv())
test_env $ .hidden <- 10

ls(test_env)
# character(0)

ls(test_env, all.names = TRUE)
# ".hidden"

      

        
        
        
      

    

As far as I can tell, the convention is applied at the level of a few useful environment search functions, but not across R in general.

Does a prefix to a variable prefix provide a variable behavior for basic language features such as lexical scope or various object systems, and if so would it make it inappropriate or dangerous to export functions with the dot-prefixed prefix?

Thanks for any help or information you can offer.

Note:

[1] By meaningful, I don't mean stylistic; this library uses special prefixes and suffixes to denote aspects of a function type signature, somewhat similar to a plyr

special naming convention. It would normally be non-semantic to use prefix prefixes, but in this case the meaning has a complex meaning.