Dynamically typed programming languages like R allow programmers to interact with the language using an interactive Read-eval-print-loop (REPL) and to write generic, flexible and concise code. On the downside, as the R interpreter has no information about the expected data type, dynamically typed programming languages usually lack formal argument checks during runtime. Even worse, many R functions automatically convert the input to avoid throwing an exception. This results in exceptions which are hard to debug. In the worst case, the lack of argument checks leads to undetected errors and thus wrong results. To mitigate this issue, runtime assertions can be manually inserted into the code to ensure correct data types and content constraints, and useful debugging information is generated if the former are violated. The package checkmate offers an extensive set of functions to check the type and relevant characteristics of the most frequently used data types in R. For example, the function 'assertInteger' also allows to check for missing values, lower and upper bounds, min/exact/max length, duplicated values or names. The package is mostly written in C to avoid any unnecessary performance overhead. Thus, the programmer can write assertions which not only outperform custom R code for such purposes, but are also much shorter and more readable. Furthermore, checkmate can simplify the writing of unit tests by extending the testthat package with many new expectation functions. Third-party packages can link against checkmate's C code to conveniently check arbitrary SEXPs in compiled code.
