Hi mokuram, As others have noted, you will profit from a bit more knowledge about "extraction":
sum(mtcars) [1] 13942.2 This works because you have "extracted" the first column of the "mtcars" data frame _as a data frame_ mtcars[1] mpg Mazda RX4 21.0 Mazda RX4 Wag 21.0 ... Volvo 142E 21.4 is.data.frame(mtcars[1]) [1] TRUE mean(mtcars) [1] NA Warning message: In mean.default(mtcars) : argument is not numeric or logical: returning NA Here you are trying to take the mean of the entire data frame. While the mean function will "coerce" a single column to a vector, it won't do so for an entire data frame. However, if you coerce the data frame to a matrix: mean(as.matrix(mtcars)) [1] 39.60853 That's the good news. The bad news is that the result is meaningless. The same thing goes for: sd(as.matrix(mtcars)) [1] 84.20792 It is almost always a good idea to read the error messages carefully and try to understand them. Jim On Mon, Nov 14, 2016 at 2:01 PM, <moku...@sina.com> wrote: > Hi, > I am working on functions such as sum(), mean() ... >> sum(mtcars)[1] 13942.2> mean(mtcars)[1] NAWarning message:In >> mean.default(mtcars) : NA> sd(mtcars)Error in is.data.frame(x) : ()'double' > why got different reply?Is this a BUG for the current version of R?my version > info:version.string R version 3.3.1 (2016-06-21) > > Thank you very much for the help. > mokuram > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see > 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. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see 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.