On Tue, Sep 26, 2017 at 2:30 AM, Göran Broström <goran.brost...@umu.se> wrote: > I am beginning to get complaints from users of my CRAN packages (especially > 'eha') to the effect that they get error messages like "Error: Unsupported > use of matrix or array for column indexing". > > It turns out that they are sticking in tibbles into functions that expect > data frames as input. And I am using the kind of subsetting that Hadley > dislikes (eha is an old package, much older than tibbles). It is of course a > simple matter to change the code so it handles both data frames and tibbles > correctly, but this affects many functions, and it will take some time. And > when the next guy introduces 'troubles' as an improvement of 'tibbles', I > will have to rewrite the code again.
Changing df[, x] to df[[x]] is not very hard and makes your code easier to understand because it more clearly conveys the intent that you want a single column. > While I like Hadley's way of doing it, I think it is a mistake to let a > tibble also be of class data frame. To me it is a matter of inheritance and > backwards compability: A tibble should add nice things to a data frame, not > change basic behaviour, in order to call itself a data frame. > > Is it correct to let a tibble be of class "data.frame"? If it not inherit from data frame, it would be not work with the 99% of functions that work with data frames and don't deliberately take advantage of the dropping behaviour of [. In other words, it would be pointless. I decided to make [.tibble type-stable (i.e. always return a data frame) because this behaviour causes substantial problems in real data analysis code. I did it understanding that it would cause some package developers frustration, but I think it's better for a handful of package maintainers to be frustrated than hundreds of users creating dangerous code. Hadley -- http://hadley.nz ______________________________________________ R-package-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel
