On Sat, Apr 5, 2014 at 8:42 AM, Simon Anders <anders@embl.de> wrote:

> Hi
>
> On 05/04/14 17:39, Simon Anders wrote:
> > When I use "mcols" on a SummerizedExperiment object, I get a DataFrame
> > with the row metadata, but without rownames. This is quite annoying if I
> > want to select specific rows using my feature identifiers.
>
> Okay, I should have read the help page for "mcols" before posting.
> Hence, I amend my question to: Is there a reason why "use.names"
> defaults to FALSE?
>
>
On an arbitrary vector, the names do not need to be unique, but they DO
need to be unique on a DataFrame (according to the data.frame conventions).
Conditioning on whether there are duplicate names would be too complicated,
so it is left to the user to declare whether the names are expected on the
result. Since in general the vector names are not valid rownames, the
default is FALSE. I guess if we really wanted to be consistent with R, we
would mangle the names to make them unique, but that check is expensive.

Just for some history, as of a couple of years ago, it always copied the
names and relied on make.unique(). Herve changed it, so he might be able to
defend it better.

Michael

  Simon
>
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