[Rd] Undocumented 'use.names' argument to c()

Suharto Anggono Suharto Anggono suharto_anggono at yahoo.com
Fri Sep 23 18:37:44 CEST 2016


In S-PLUS 3.4 help on 'c' (http://www.uni-muenster.de/ZIV.BennoSueselbeck/s-html/helpfiles/c.html), there is no 'use.names' argument.

Because 'c' is a generic function, I don't think that changing formal arguments is good.

In R devel r71344, 'use.names' is not an argument of functions 'c.Date', 'c.POSIXct' and 'c.difftime'.

Could 'use.names' be documented to be accepted by the default method of 'c', but not listed as a formal argument of 'c'? Or, could the code that handles the argument name 'use.names' be removed?
----------------
>>>>> David Winsemius <dwinsemius at comcast.net>
>>>>>     on Tue, 20 Sep 2016 23:46:48 -0700 writes:

    >> On Sep 20, 2016, at 7:18 PM, Karl Millar via R-devel <r-devel at r-project.org> wrote:
    >> 
    >> 'c' has an undocumented 'use.names' argument.  I'm not sure if this is
    >> a documentation or implementation bug.

    > It came up on stackoverflow a couple of years ago:

    > http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24815572/why-does-function-c-accept-an-undocumented-argument/24815653#24815653

    > At the time it appeared to me to be a documentation lag.

Thank you, Karl and David,
yes it is a documentation glitch ... and a bit more:  Experts know that
print()ing of primitive functions is, eehm, "special".

I've committed a change to R-devel ... (with the intent to port
to R-patched).

Martin

    >> 
    >>> c(a = 1)
    >> a
    >> 1
    >>> c(a = 1, use.names = F)
    >> [1] 1
    >> 
    >> Karl



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