Ditching T/F for TRUE/FALSE would get my vote, too.
-Peter Ehlers
On 2010-03-08 17:44, Rolf Turner wrote:
On 9/03/2010, at 11:17 AM, Mike Prager wrote:
Rolf Turner<r.tur...@auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
I solved the problem by putting in a colClasses argument in my
call to read.csv(). But I really think that the read functions
are being too clever by half here. If field entries are surrounded
by quotes, shouldn't they be left as character? Even if they are
all F's and T's?
Furthermore using F's and T's to represent TRUE's and FALSE's is
bad practice anyway. Since FALSE and TRUE are reserved words it
would make sense for the read function to assume that a field is
logical if it consists entirely of these words. But T's and F's
.... I don't think so.
I would argue that this behaviour should be changed. I can see no
downside to such a change.
I agree with you, Rolf, that this is horrid behavior. It is such
automatic devices that have made people hate (e.g.) Microsoft
Word with a passion.
Yet, in R this is a designed-in bug (e.g., feature) that
probably can't be changed without making some legacy code not
work. But at least, T and F could be removed soon as synonms for
TRUE and FALSE. We have seen that "_" was removed as an
assignment operator, and the world did not crumble. The use of T
and F is no less error-prone, and possibly more.
I would definitely support the removal of the use of T
and F for TRUE and FALSE. Some code would break, but
it would be easy to trace the source of the problem and
easy to fix.
The only immediate solution to this accretion of overly clever
behavior would be for someone to write new functions (say,
Read.csv) that didn't do all those conversions behind the
scenes. I'm not about to do that. Are you?
NFL!!!
cheers,
Rolf
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Peter Ehlers
University of Calgary
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