[R] Variable passed to function not used in function in select=... in subset

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 11/11/2008 5:00 AM, Berwin A Turlach wrote:

> Radford Neal is also complaining on his blog
> (http://radfordneal.wordpress.com/) about what he thinks are design
> flaws in R.  Why don't you two get together and design a good
> substitute without any flaws?  Or is that too hard? ;-)

I agree with Radford (who was complaining about surprising behaviour 
with dropped dimensions in array indexing, and the result of 1:n when n 
is zero), but I don't particularly like his solution.  It seems to me 
that introducing a new operator that returns "a sequence from 1 up to n" 
is a good idea, but having a new data type is not:  there is too much 
legacy code that would not be able to handle it.  So we need some other 
way to handle the array indexing problem, such as ways to detect 
unintentional omissions of "drop=FALSE", if we want to handle it.

Duncan Murdoch