On 04/04/2014 1:32 PM, Dan Murphy wrote:
I just noticed this annoyance, but I'm not the first one, apparently
-- see
http://lists.r-forge.r-project.org/pipermail/datatable-help/2012-May/001176.html
The thread never answered the OP's question "Is this a bug?" so I
assume the answer, unfortunately, is No.
If not a bug, do users of within have a workaround to produce a result
with columns as ordered within 'within'? I can think of a way using
names and subset-with-select, but that seems unduly kludgy.
I wouldn't be surprised if it is not consistent about that. It uses
as.list to convert an environment to a list, and that's where the
reversal occurs: but since environments are unordered collections of
objects, you just happen to be seeing an undocumented and unpromised
property of the internal implementation.
If the order matters to you, then create your initial dataframe with the
new variables (set to NA, for example), or reorder it afterwards. But
generally speaking even in a dataframe (which is an ordered collection
of objects), it's better to program in a way that doesn't make
assumptions about the order. Columns have names, and you should use those.
Duncan Murdoch
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