[R] How to prevent fix() from converting Dates into numeric

[Prof Brian Ripley]

fix on a data frame calls edit: see ?edit.data.frame.  The help for 
fix does say

   Editing an \R object may change it in ways other than are obvious: see
   the comment under \code{\link{edit}}.

The simple answer is not to use fix() or edit() on other than the data 
frames they are documented to work on.

On Fri, 7 Dec 2007, Christian Gold wrote:

> Dear list members
>
> Here is a strange problem that I have had for a long time, without
> finding out how to solve it. Whenever I use fix() on a data.frame that
> contains Dates, these are converted to numerics. As shown by the very
> simple example:
>
> a <- data.frame(var1 = 1, today = Sys.Date() )
> a
> fix(a)
> a
>
> Why is that? And can anything be done against it?
>
> Many thanks for your help!
>
> Best,
>
> Christian Gold
> www.uib.no/people/cgo022
>
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> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595