Please take what follows not as an ad hominem statement, but rather as an attempt to improve what is already an excellent program, that has been built as a result of many, many hours of dedicated work by many, many unpaid, unsung volunteers.
It troubles me a bit that when a confusing aspect of R is pointed out the response is not to try to improve the language so as to avoid the confusion, but rather to state that the confusion is inherent in the language. I understand that to make changes that would avoid the confusing aspect of the language that has been discussed in this thread would take time and effort by an R wizard (which I am not), time and effort that would not be compensated in the traditional sense. This does not mean that we should not acknowledge the confusion. If we what R to be the de facto lingua franca of statistical analysis doesn't it make sense to strive for syntax that is as straight forward and consistent as possible? Again, please understand that my comment is made with deepest respect for the many people who have unselfishly contributed to the R project. Many thanks to each and every one of you. John >>> Karl Ove Hufthammer <k...@huftis.org> 3/2/2010 4:00 AM >>> 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. Confidentiality Statement: This email message, including any attachments, is for th...{{dropped:6}} ______________________________________________ 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.
