<Bill.Venables <at> csiro.au> writes: > > Your complaint is based on what you think a factor should be rather than what it actually is andhow it works. > The trick with R (BTW I think it's version 2.12.x rather than 12.x at this stage...) is learning to work > *with* it as it is rather than making it work the way you would like it to do. > > Factors are a bit tricky. The are numeric objects, even if arithmetic is inhibited.
Sorry. You didn't get my point. I know how factors work (see my reply to Ista). I don't even want to change the general behaviour (though I am convinced that it is very ill designed). I just want to be able to change some option to generate a warning in a case of probable unintended use, for those poor souls beginning to use R (or S-plus either). As I explained to Ista, the error is very likely to happen in very common situations, without any warning at any stage. Sometimes warnings are generated by R functions (such as when strings are converted to factors implicitly for lm() ), but most of those warnings are spurious. Of course, I shall teach my students of R to be afraid of such errors, but it is clearly embarassing to explain the reason. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
