[Rd] Ops.Date: promote characters to Dates?

[Gabor Grothendieck]

Note that the first argument still cannot be character
since Ops.Date won't get dispatched in that case.

On 6/24/06, Ben Bolker <bolker at ufl.edu> wrote:
>  Ops.Date  <- function (e1, e2)
> {
>    if (nargs() == 1)
>        stop("unary ", .Generic, " not defined for Date objects")
>    boolean <- switch(.Generic, "<" = , ">" = , "==" = , "!=" = ,
>        "<=" = , ">=" = TRUE, FALSE)
>    if (!boolean)
>        stop(.Generic, " not defined for Date objects")
> +    if (!nchar(e1)) e1 <- as.Date(e1)
> +    if (!nchar(e2)) e2 <- as.Date(e2)
>    NextMethod(.Generic)
> }
>
>  adding the above two lines to Ops.Date makes, e.g.
>
> as.Date("1999-12-13") == "1999-06-14"
>
> behave as "expected".
>
>  Does it seem like a good idea?
>  (I was inspired by a student's confusion, and by
> the fact that Ops.factor does a similar thing -- although
> in this case it seems more sensible to promote the
> character to a Date rather than demoting the Date
> to a character (in which case comparisons might not
> work right?))
>
>  Similar questions might apply to Ops.POSIXt ...
>
>  Ben Bolker
>
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