[Rd] unexpected behavior of `[<-` method for class unit.arithmetic
Paul Murrell
p.murrell at auckland.ac.nz
Fri Sep 25 01:39:48 CEST 2009
Hi
The bit you found that says ...
# Write "[<-.unit" methods too ??
... is the crucial bit.
Would it be possible to add such a method?
Almost certainly, it just needs someone to repeatedly bug the person who
can make the change :) Thanks for the suggestion for code BTW; I'll
take a look at that.
In the meantime, the fact that this has only come up once before, while
surprising, suggests that people may have written code in a different
style. Can you give a succinct example that demonstrates a situation
where you want to assign to a subset of a unit (rather than, say,
calculating values, setting some to 0, then building a unit from the
values) ?
Paul
baptiste auguie wrote:
> Dear list,
>
> Consider the following,
>
> library(grid)
>
> w = unit.c(unit(1, "in"), unit(2, "in"))
> w2 = w + unit(1, "mm")
>
> w[2] <- 0
> w2[2] <- 0
>
> convertUnit(w, "mm")
> #[1] 25.4mm 0mm
> convertUnit(w2, "mm")
> #Error in grid.Call("L_convert", x, as.integer(whatfrom),
> as.integer(whatto), :
> # INTEGER() can only be applied to a 'integer', not a 'NULL'
>
> The last line fails, as the naive replacement has destroyed the
> structure of w2 instead of having assigned a value of 0 to the second
> unit element.
>
> I've also tried,
>
> w = unit.c(unit(1, "in"), unit(2, "in"))
> w2 = w + unit(1, "mm")
> w2[[2]][2] <- 0
>
> but this time, if the structure is licit, it's the result that's not
> as I intended:
>
> convertUnit(w2,"mm")
> #[1] 26.4mm 1mm
>
> My limited understanding is that an object of class unit.arithmetic is
> waiting until the last moment to actually perform its operation,
> stored in a tree-like structure. With this premise, I can't think of a
> good way to modify one element of a list of unit elements.
>
> As a workaround, I can only think of the following hack where the
> objects are forced to be evaluated,
>
> w = unit.c(unit(1, "in"), unit(2, "in"))
> w2 = convertUnit(w + unit(1, "mm"), "mm", valueOnly=TRUE)
> w2[2] <- 0
> w2 <- unit(w2, "mm")
>
> but it clearly isn't a very desirable route.
>
> What is the recommended way to modify one element of a unit vector?
>
> Digging in grid/R/unit.R , I found the following comment,
>
> # Write "[<-.unit" methods too ??
>
> which probably explains the above. Would it be possible to add such a method,
>
> "[<-.unit.list" <- function(x, index, value, top=TRUE, ...) {
> this.length <- length(x)
> index <- (1L:this.length)[index]
>
> if (top && any(index > this.length))
> stop("Index out of bounds (unit list subsetting)")
> cl <- class(x)
> result <- unclass(x)
> result[(index - 1) %% this.length + 1] <- value
> class(result) <- cl
> result
> }
>
> a = unit.c(unit(1,"mm"),unit(2,"in"))
> a[2] <- unit(3,"in")
> a
>
> but for unit.arithmetic also?
>
> Regards,
>
> baptiste
>
> sessionInfo()
> R version 2.9.2 (2009-08-24)
> i386-apple-darwin8.11.1
>
> locale:
> en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/C/C/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8
>
> attached base packages:
> [1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets grid methods
> [8] base
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
--
Dr Paul Murrell
Department of Statistics
The University of Auckland
Private Bag 92019
Auckland
New Zealand
64 9 3737599 x85392
paul at stat.auckland.ac.nz
http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~paul/
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