[R] dim vs length for vectors
Gabor Grothendieck
ggrothendieck at myway.com
Fri Jan 21 19:12:43 CET 2005
Sorry, I meant as.array, not array.
Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 12:21:39 -0500 (EST)
From: Gabor Grothendieck <ggrothendieck at myway.com>
To: <olau at fas.harvard.edu>, <ligges at statistik.uni-dortmund.de>, <ahenningsen at email.uni-kiel.de>
Cc: <r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch>
Subject: Re: [R] dim vs length for vectors
Perhaps you could just write dim(array(x)) when you want
that effect. That has the advantage of not requiring any
change to R and preserving the meaning of dim(x) as retrieving
the dim attribute.
Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 10:00:01 -0500
From: Olivia Lau <olau at fas.harvard.edu>
To: Uwe Ligges <ligges at statistik.uni-dortmund.de>,Arne Henningsen <ahenningsen at email.uni-kiel.de>
Cc: <r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch>
Subject: Re: [R] dim vs length for vectors
What I was proposing doesn't require a lot of programming. Just
whenever you call dim(), it does length() if the object is a
vector and returns it in the format:
R> a <- 1:12
R> dim(a)
[1] 12
This means that you can provide a unified introduction to data
structures that take only one type of atomic value (and
generally call these structures "arrays"). What I call a "one
dimensional array" only has one dim attribute and hence would
use a[4] for extraction (for example), which is consistent with
the usage for "[" (to my understanding). That way, when you
introduce "[" and arrays at the same time, you can tell
beginners:
1) Run dim()
2) If there's one dim, use [ ]; if there are 2 dims, use [
, ]; if there are 3 dims, you use [ , , ].
This is conceptually easy for a beginner and avoids a bit of
frustration.
If I need to initiate an empty vector for example I use
R> a <- array()
It just looks like the difference between a 1-d array (which
doesn't exist as far as I can tell) and a vector is semantic,
and I think that R would be more logical if they were treated as
the same thing. This doesn't mean changing the way the
is.array(), is.vector(), <-, etc functions work, but just
changing dim().
More information about the R-help
mailing list