[R] The end of Matlab

[Claudia Beleites]

I just realized that my idea of doing something without going into the 
extraction functions itself won't work 
:-( it was a nice dream, though.

The reason is that there is no general way to find out what the needed length 
is: At least I'm just writing a class where 2 kinds of columns are involved. I 
don't give a dim attribute, though. But I could, and then: how to know how it 
should be interpreted?

> on the other hand, another possible solution would be to have ':' mean,
> inside range selection expressions, not the usual sequence generation,
> but rather specification of start and end indices:
...
> this is daydreaming, of course, because such modifications would break
> much old code,
nothing would break if some other sign instead of : would be used. Maybe 
something like "end"...

> and the benefit may not outweigh the effort.
This might be true in any case.

If I only think of how many lines of nrow, ncol, length & Co I could have 
written instead of posting wrong proposals....

Claudia

-- 
Claudia Beleites
Dipartimento dei Materiali e delle Risorse Naturali
Università degli Studi di Trieste
Via Alfonso Valerio 6/a
I-34127 Trieste

phone: +39 (0 40) 5 58-34 47
email: cbeleites at units.it