Hi
r-help-boun...@r-project.org napsal dne 09.03.2010 01:44:38:
>
> 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.
I would respectfully oppose it. It may be quite convenient for making code
for functions and other programming stuff but all using R more or less in
interactive way this change could be quite a burden especially when there
are many functions which use TRUE/FALSE for setting its parameters.
In those (and many others) instances I almost exclusively use T/F
shortcut.
read.delim(file, header = TRUE, sep = "\t", quote="\"", dec=".", fill =
TRUE, comment.char="", ...)
lm(formula, data, subset, weights, na.action,method = "qr", model = TRUE,
x = FALSE, y = FALSE, qr = TRUE, singular.ok = TRUE, contrasts = NULL,
offset, ...)
If this had to be changed I would vote for some change which allow users
some other shortcut for setting interactively parameters in functions.
Regards
Petr
> >
> > 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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