I wrote: "I confess to being puzzled WHY the R core has decided on this definition..." After just a little more thought let me answer my own question.
a. The as.vector() function is designed to strip off everything extraneous and leave just the core. (I have a mental image of Jack Webb saying "Just the facts ma'am"). I myself use it freqently in the test suite for survival, in cases where I'm checking the corrent numeric result and don't care about any attached names. b. is.vector(x) essentially answers the question "does x look like a result of as.vector?" Nevertheless I understand Roger's confusion. -- Terry M Therneau, PhD Department of Quantitative Health Sciences Mayo Clinic thern...@mayo.edu "TERR-ree THUR-noh" [[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.