[R] confusion about what to expect?

[A.J. Rossini]

In playing around with data.frames (and wanting a simple, cheap way to
use the variable and case names in plots; but I've solved that with
some hacks, yech), I noticed the following behavior with subsetting. 


testdata <- data.frame(matrix(1:20,nrow=4,ncol=5))
names(testdata) ## expect labels, get them
names(testdata[2,]) ## expect labels, get them
names(testdata[,2]) ## expect labels, but NOT --  STRIPPED OFF??
testdata[,2]  ## would have expect a name (X2) in the front? NOT EXPECTED
testdata[2,]  ## get what I expect
testdata[2,2]  ## just a number, not a sub-data.frame? unexpected
testdata[2,2:3] ## this is a data.frame
testdata[2:3,2:3] ## and this is, too.

> version
         _                
platform i386-pc-linux-gnu
arch     i386             
os       linux-gnu        
system   i386, linux-gnu  
status   alpha            
major    1                
minor    8.0              
year     2003             
month    09               
day      20               
language R                
> 

I don't have 1.7.1 handy at this location to test, but I would've
expected a data.frame-like object upon subsetting; should I have
expected otherwise?  (granted, a data.frame with just a single
variable could be thought of as silly, but it does have some extra
information that might be worthwhile, on occassion?)

I'm not sure that it is a bug, but I was caught by suprise.  If it
isn't a bug, and someone has a concise way to think through this, for
my future reference, I'd appreciate hearing about it.

best,
-tony

-- 
rossini at u.washington.edu            http://www.analytics.washington.edu/ 
Biomedical and Health Informatics   University of Washington
Biostatistics, SCHARP/HVTN          Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
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