[Rd] [PATCH] show vector length in summary()

[Simon Urbanek]

On Sep 10, 2013, at 12:56 PM, Sam Steingold wrote:

>> * Dirk Eddelbuettel <rqq at qrovna.bet> [2013-09-10 10:21:33 -0500]:
>> 
>> On 10 September 2013 at 10:32, Sam Steingold wrote:
>> | (summary.default): show the vector length in addition to quantiles
>> | 
>> | 
>> | diff -u -i -p -F '^(def' -b -w -B /home/sds/src/R-3.0.1/src/library/base/R/summary.R.old /home/sds/src/R-3.0.1/src/library/base/R/summary.R
>> | --- /home/sds/src/R-3.0.1/src/library/base/R/summary.R.old	2013-03-05 18:02:33.000000000 -0500
>> | +++ /home/sds/src/R-3.0.1/src/library/base/R/summary.R	2013-09-10 10:19:02.682946339 -0400
>> | @@ -39,6 +39,7 @@ summary.default <-
>> |  	qq <- stats::quantile(object)
>> |  	qq <- signif(c(qq[1L:3L], mean(object), qq[4L:5L]), digits)
>> |  	names(qq) <- c("Min.", "1st Qu.", "Median", "Mean", "3rd Qu.", "Max.")
>> | +  qq <- c(qq,"Length" = length(object))
>> |  	if(any(nas))
>> |  	    c(qq, "NA's" = sum(nas))
>> |  	else qq
>> | 
>> | Diff finished.  Tue Sep 10 10:19:40 2013
>> 
>> Base R functions are rarely modified; others may have expectations on
>> summary() returning the six values it returns.
> 
> Note that summary sometimes returns 5 values (when there no "NA's").
> It is clearly wrong to rely on the details of the return value of a UI function.
> 

.. except that summary() is not a UI function. It is used to create summary *objects*, not some UI output. Although sometimes users like to print such summary objects, that is not the task of summary(). There are quite common programmatic uses of summary() -- one prominent one that comes to my mind is in conjunction with connections.
 (Not that any of this has anything to do with the original question ... )


>> Many alternatives are available, including describe in Hmisc which
>> returns the count you suggest, and a count of missingness.
> 
> Such a minor issue hardly justifies installing a whole new package.
> (but thanks for the suggestion!)
> 
> -- 
> Sam Steingold (http://sds.podval.org/) on Ubuntu 13.04 (raring) X 11.0.11303000
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