[R] diagnostic information ....

[Rolf Turner]

Paul E. Johnson wrote:

> I handed out some results from glm() and the students ask "how many 
> observations were dropped due to missing values"?
> 
> How would I know? 
> 
> In other stat programs, the results will typically include N and
> the number dropped because of missings.  Without going back to R and
> fiddling about to find the total number of rows in the dataframe,
> there is no way to tell.  Somewhat inconvenient. Do you agree?

In a word:  No.  R is ``not like other packages'' which spew out
enormous printouts including every statistic known to man and a few
known only to woman.  R basically gives you what you ask for, and
assumes you know enough to know what to ask for.  It does not
condescendingly make decisions for you and hand-cuff you into doing a
standard analysis.

It also allows infinitely versatile customization with consumate
ease since it is a beautifully designed programming language.  It
would be ***VERY*** easy to write a wrapper for glm() to include
the number of dropped observations if you want to include that
information in a ``printout''.

				cheers,

					Rolf Turner
					rolf at math.unb.ca