On Mon, 01 Mar 2010 10:00:07 -0500 Duncan Murdoch <murd...@stats.uwo.ca> wrote: > Suppose X is a dataframe or a matrix. What would you expect to get from > X[1]? What about as.vector(X), or as.numeric(X)?
All this of course depends on type of object one is speaking of. There are plenty of surprises available, and it's best to use the most logical way of extracting. E.g., to extract the top-left element of a 2D structure (data frame or matrix), use 'X[1,1]'. Luckily, R provides some shortcuts. For example, you can write 'X[2,3]' on a data frame, just as if it was a matrix, even though the underlying structure is completely different. (This doesn't work on a normal list; there you have to type the whole 'X[[2]][3]'.) The behaviour of the 'as.' functions may sometimes be surprising, at least for me. For example, 'as.data.frame' on a named vector gives a single-column data frame, instead of a single-row data frame. (I'm not sure what's the recommended way of converting a named vector to row data frame, but 'as.data.frame(t(X))' works, even though both 'X' and 't(X)' looks like a row of numbers.) > The point is that a dataframe is a list, and a matrix isn't. If users > don't understand that, then they'll be confused somewhere. Making > matrices more list-like in one respect will just move the confusion > elsewhere. The solution is to understand the difference. My main problem is not understanding the difference, which is easy, but knowing which type of I have when I get the output a function in a package. If I know the object is a named vector or a matrix with column names, it's easy enough to type 'X[,"colname"]', and if it's a data frame one may use the shortcut 'X$colname'. Usually, it *is* documented what the return value of a function is, but just looking at the output is much faster, and *usually* gives the correct answer. For example, 'mean' applied on a data frame gives a named vector, not a data frame, which is somewhat surprising (given that the columns of a data frame may be of different types, while the elements of a vector may not). (And yes, I know that it's *documented* that it returns a named vector.) On the other hand, perhaps it is surprising that 'mean' works on data frames at all. :-) -- Karl Ove Hufthammer ______________________________________________ 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.
