[R] assignment of inidividual variables from spss save files

[Thomas Lumley]

On Mon, 13 Jun 2005, BXC (Bendix Carstensen) wrote:

> The key to solving your problem is that read.spss per default
> gives you a *list* and not a *dataframe* (can anyone explain this
> choice of default?).
>

The reason for the default is speed.

It's possible that the default could be changed to make it easier to use 
for people who don't read the help page. I haven't measured the speed 
difference recently, but it used to be significant.  IIRC the reasoning 
was that you would often want just a few variables from a data file, in 
which case subsetting before creating a data frame was a worthwhile 
saving.

I have certainly had complaints that reading just a few variables from a 
large Stata file is slow (because it does produce a data frame first)


 	-thomas