[Rd] transform.data.frame() ignores unnamed arguments when no named argument is provided

[@vi@e@gross m@iii@g oii gm@ii@com]

I am probably mistaken but it looks to me like the design of much of the data.frame infrastructure not only does not insist you give columns names, but even has all kinds of options such as check.names and fix.empty.names

https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/base/versions/3.6.2/topics/data.frame

During the lifetime of a column, it can get removed, renamed, transfomed in many ways and so on. A data.frame read in from a file such as a .CSV often begins with temporary created names. 

It is so common, that sometimes not giving a name is a choice and not in any way an error. I have seen some rather odd names in backticks that include spaces and seen duplicate names. The reality is you can index by column number two and maybe no actual name was needed by the one creating or modifying the data.

Some placed warnings are welcome as they tend to reflect a possibly serious error.  But that error may not easily be at this point versus later in the game.  If later the program tries to access the misnamed column, then an error makes sense. Warnings, if overused, get old quickly and you regularly see code written to suppress startup messages or warnings because the same message shown every day becomes something you ignore mentally even if not suppressed. How many times has loading the tidyverse reminded me it is shadowing a few base R functions? How many times have I really cared?

What makes some sense to me is to add an argument to some functions BEGGING to be shown the errors of your ways and turn that on as you wish, often after something has gone wrong.

-----Original Message-----
From: R-devel <r-devel-bounces using r-project.org> On Behalf Of Martin Maechler
Sent: Friday, March 3, 2023 10:26 AM
To: Gabriel Becker <gabembecker using gmail.com>
Cc: Antoine Fabri <antoine.fabri using gmail.com>; R-devel <r-devel using r-project.org>
Subject: Re: [Rd] transform.data.frame() ignores unnamed arguments when no named argument is provided

>>>>> Gabriel Becker 
>>>>>     on Thu, 2 Mar 2023 14:37:18 -0800 writes:

    > On Thu, Mar 2, 2023 at 2:02 PM Antoine Fabri
    > <antoine.fabri using gmail.com> wrote:

    >> Thanks and good point about unspecified behavior. The way
    >> it behaves now (when it doesn't ignore) is more
    >> consistent with data.frame() though so I prefer that to a
    >> "warn and ignore" behaviour:
    >> 
    >> data.frame(a = 1, b = 2, 3)
    >> 
    >> #> a b X3
    >> 
    >> #> 1 1 2 3
    >> 
    >> 
    >> data.frame(a = 1, 2, 3)
    >> 
    >> #> a X2 X3
    >> 
    >> #> 1 1 2 3
    >> 
    >> 
    >> (and in general warnings make for unpleasant debugging so
    >> I prefer when we don't add new ones if avoidable)
    >> 

    > I find silence to be much more unpleasant in practice when
    > debugging, myself, but that may be a personal preference.

+1

I also *strongly* disagree with the claim

   " in general warnings make for unpleasant debugging "

That may be true for beginners (for whom debugging is often not really
feasible anyway ..), but somewhat experienced useRs should know

about
    options(warn = 1) # or
    options(warn = 2) # plus  options(error = recover) #
or
    tryCatch( ...,  warning = ..)

or  {even more}

Martin

--
Martin Maechler
ETH Zurich  and  R Core team

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