On Tue, Sep 26, 2017 at 8:51 AM, Pedro J. Aphalo <pedro.aph...@helsinki.fi> wrote: > What I think is troublesome is that data.frame is part of the definition > of the R language, and the expectation based on R's normal behaviour is > that testing with is.data.frame() should be enough to ensure that an > object can be treated as a data frame. We can think of different > solutions for use in our packages, but the naive R user will be always > surprised by the behaviour of tibbles because package 'tibble' breaks > the expectations of the R language with an exception. > > I do not know what could be the best solution... though. Maybe thinking > of tibbles as a step towards R++ or R 4 or whatever future enhanced > version of R, in which they will replace data frames completely. Hadley > is correct in that they are a very significant improvement to R, but the > problem is the inconsistent behaviour.
There are basically two classes of surprise: 1) You might be surprised that [ sometimes returns a vector and sometimes returns a data frame. 2) You might be surprised that tibbles behave differently to data frames for this one method. I obviously believe that 1) is the worse surprise, but others differ. This wouldn't normally be a problem but people use tibbles with packages written by people who don't share my belief that 1) is surprising and dangerous. Hadley -- http://hadley.nz ______________________________________________ R-package-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel
