On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 7:27 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murd...@stats.uwo.ca> wrote: > John Sorkin wrote: >> >> 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? > > I think you've misunderstood the argument. It would not be hard to make the > suggested change. I don't object to it because it would be too much work, I > object to it because I think it is not an improvement. Dataframes and > matrices are different, and there is no way to avoid that fact. > The arguments in favour of the change seem to be these:
Users of zoo have some experience with this since zoo uses matrices to represent 2d time series and originally did not support $ as a column extractor but now does. I was originally opposed to adding it for the reasons you state but it was eventually added and having used it for some time now since it got into the package I must say that it is very convenient and I now regard it as a definite improvement in user experience. Certainly I use the feature all the time. ______________________________________________ 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.
