[Rd] Assignment of individual values to data frame columns: intentional or unintentional behavior?

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 12:24 PM, Ulrike Grömping
<groemping at bht-berlin.de> wrote:
> Dear developeRs,
>
> I have just discovered a strange feature when assigning some values to
> columns of a data frame: The column is matched by partial matching (as
> documented), but when assigning a value, a new column with the partial name
> is added to the data frame that is identical to the original column except
> for the changed value. Is that intentional ? An example:

Note that the lack of partial matching when performing assignment is
also documented.

See second last paragraph in Details section of ?Extract