[Rd] clearNames and unname

[Douglas Bates]

On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 10:02 AM, Martin
Maechler<maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch> wrote:
>>>>>> "MM" == Martin Maechler <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch>
>>>>>>     on Thu, 3 Sep 2009 16:14:24 +0200 writes:
>
>>>>>> "HW" == Hadley Wickham <hadley at rice.edu>
>>>>>>     on Thu, 3 Sep 2009 08:16:27 -0500 writes:
>
>    HW> Just noticed these two functions (clearNames is stats and unname in
>    HW> base) that do the same thing.
>
>    MM> clearNames looks like an accident.  unname() has existed for
>    MM> much longer {and as someone else said},
>    MM> has been more general, too.
>
> Hmm, the first part in the above may be wrong:
> clearNames() has been part of the 'nls' package (before that
> was integrated into 'stats'),
> and the code of 'nls' may well have been almost as old as the
> unname() function :
> I see both in  R 0.90.1  (December 15, 1999).
>
> I see only about 5 usages of clearNames() in CRAN packages, and
> none in the 300+ Bioconductor "Rpacks"  packages.
>
> Consequently, I'm proposing to deprecate  clearNames() {for
> unname()}.

Fine with me.  I had forgotten that we even wrote clearNames() for the
nls package.