[Rd] [ subscripting sometimes loses names (PR#8192)

maechler@stat.math.ethz.ch maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch
Wed Oct 19 14:34:10 CEST 2005


Andy,

that's interesting, but honestly your posting only *talked*
about your perceptions of bogous behavior of R and gave link to 
a quite extensive S source file --- which re-defines basic
functions so it's not a file I'd just want to source into my R
session.

Proper R bug reports provide short "cut & paste" executable
example code {i.e. no prompt, no output} or at least the 
transcript of such code {transcript : input (+ prompt) + output}.

Also your script is for R and S-plus and at least in some places 
it seems you think R has a bug because it behaves differently
than S or S-plus.   
Now I'm sure you know from the R-FAQ that there are quite a few
intentional differences between the two dialects of S,
and dealing with data frames is definitely one situation where
we have tried to do better than "the prototype", so we would say
the bug is with S(-plus).

In spite of all the above, I'd well expect that you still know
about problematic or even bogous behavior of "[" subscripting,
but we'd rather see small reproducible code snippets rather than
scripts that redefine "[" and "[.data.frame" and further assume
a patched all.equal()..

Best regards,
Martin Maechler



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