dist(*, "euclidean") [was "dist function suggestion"]

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> "BDR" == Prof Brian Ripley <ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk> writes:

    >> Date: Wed, 20 Jan 1999 12:03:38 +0000 (GMT)
    >> From: Jonathan Rougier <J.C.Rougier@durham.ac.uk>
    >> To: Friedrich Leisch <Friedrich.Leisch@ci.tuwien.ac.at>
    >> cc: r-devel@stat.math.ethz.ch
    >> Subject: Re: dist function suggestion
    >> 
    >> On Wed, 20 Jan 1999, Friedrich Leisch wrote:
    >> 
    >> > dist is contained in the mva package which comes with (base) R. it
    >> > provides `"euclidian"', `"maximum"', `"manhattan"', `"canberra"' and
    >> > `"binary"' distances both in matrix and triangular form.
    >> 
    >> Thanks Fritz, but could I still make a general plea for a dist() that
    >> takes one OR two matrices?  I often need to find dist(X, Y) as a
    >> rectangular matrix (eg covariance calculations), and it is very
    >> inefficient to use dist(rbind(X, Y))  and then discard most of it. 

    BDR> You will need to call it something else: dist is a clone of an S
    BDR> function, and dist(X, "manhattan") is well-established usage.

one could still imagine an extra Y argument such that
	dist(X, Y=myY, method="euclidean")
and	dist(X, "euclidean", Y=myY)
would work
one could even make it such that
both
	dist(X, myY)
and	dist(X, "euclidean")
would work.  However, the extra hack for 	dist(X, Y)
may not be worth the pain.

    BDR> I pointed out to R-core recently that "euclidian" will cause
    BDR> problems for those who know how to spell it .... (-ean in my
    BDR> dictionaries, and in S).

Yes, thank you;  for me, I've considered this a bug report.
Hopefully nobody has currently code relying on the wrong spelling...

Martin

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