[R] subset(..., drop=TRUE) doesn't seem to work.

[Peter Dalgaard]

Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> writes:

> No, AFAIK. It was definitely not documented to last November when that 
> comment was added to ?subset.
> 
> > Bottomline: unless I find the time to submit a patch for '[.data.frame', 
> > I'll need to use the more elaborate way of dropping the unused levels?
> > 
> > Does "will not drop" imply that it cannot be programmed, should not be 
> > programmed, or has not been programmed yet?
> 
> It is designed not to.  Look at how ?"[.data.frame" documents it.  We
> don't want it altered and it would break a lot of code to do so.  I think
> the author of those lines was under a misapprension.

Not to say confused... (Brian is tactful enough not to say it was me).
Looking back through my emails from then, I can't say it's all that
surprising. It came from a feature request (the author of which shall
remain anonymous):

...
> noticed that subset.data.frame has drop=FALSE `hard-wired`
> into it, making it problematic in case of factors (depending
> on required behaviour). 

and with 3 days to go before 1.8.1, I seem to have just implemented
the suggestion without thinking. (I think we did have a drop.factor at
some point back in the stone age where factors were a primitive data
type, which may have contributed to the confusion.)

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
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