[Rd] ambiguity in the documented return value of Null() from package MASS

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> peter dalgaard <pdalgd at gmail.com>
>>>>>     on Mon, 10 Nov 2014 14:47:16 +0100 writes:

    > There is a maintainer for this contributed package...
    > However, a zero column vector _is_ numeric(0) -- with
    > dimension attributes c(3,0).

    > structure(numeric(0),dim=c(3,0))
    > c(Null(diag(3)))

    > I.e., the ambiguity is pretty slight. 

    > Presumably, the help file wording goes back to S-PLUS
    > which (to my recollection) didn't allow zero-extent
    > matrices. The actual behaviour is a clear improvement.

    > - Peter D.

confirmed:

- S-PLUS aka S+ aka ...  did not have 0-extent matrices nor arrays
- R having them makes for much more consistent code in several places.
- one could argue that  matrix( , 3, 0) *is* a special case of
 an empty vector

Further confirmation [not for Peter, for other readers] :

> str(Null(diag(3)))
 num[1:3, 0 ] 
> identical(Null(diag(3)), matrix(pi, 3,0))
[1] TRUE
> 





    > On 10 Nov 2014, at 13:49 , Georgi Boshnakov <georgi.boshnakov at manchester.ac.uk> wrote:

    >> Hi,
    >> 
    >> Function Null from package MASS seems to return a matrix with zero columns and the expected number of rows when
    >> the null space of the argument contains only the zero vector, e.g. 
    >> 
    >>> library(MASS)
    >>> diag(nrow=3)
    >> [,1] [,2] [,3]
    >> [1,]    1    0    0
    >> [2,]    0    1    0
    >> [3,]    0    0    1
    >> 
    >>> Null(diag(nrow=3))
    >> 
    >> [1,]
    >> [2,]
    >> [3,]
    >> 
    >> But the documentation of Null  seems to imply that the result is numeric(0):
    >> 
    >> -----------------------------------------------
    >> 
    >> Value: 
    >> 
    >> The matrix 'N' with the basis for the null space, or an empty
    >> vector if the matrix 'M' is square and of maximal rank.
    >> 
    >> -----------------------------------------------
    >> 
    >> (R version 3.1.1 Patched (2014-09-21 r66653) -- "Sock it to Me")
    >> 
    >> Georgi
    >> 
    >> ______________________________________________
    >> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
    >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel

    > -- 
    > Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
    > Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
    > Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
    > Phone: (+45)38153501
    > Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com

    > ______________________________________________
    > R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
    > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel