[R] A slight trap in read.table/read.csv.

[Peter Ehlers]

Ditching T/F for TRUE/FALSE would get my vote, too.

  -Peter Ehlers

On 2010-03-08 17:44, Rolf Turner wrote:
>
> On 9/03/2010, at 11:17 AM, Mike Prager wrote:
>
>> Rolf Turner<r.turner at auckland.ac.nz>  wrote:
>>>
>>> I solved the problem by putting in a colClasses argument in my
>>> call to read.csv().  But I really think that the read functions
>>> are being too clever by half here.  If field entries are surrounded
>>> by quotes, shouldn't they be left as character?  Even if they are
>>> all F's and T's?
>>>
>>> Furthermore using F's and T's to represent TRUE's and FALSE's is
>>> bad practice anyway.  Since FALSE and TRUE are reserved words it
>>> would make sense for the read function to assume that a field is
>>> logical if it consists entirely of these words.  But T's and F's
>>> .... I don't think so.
>>>
>>> I would argue that this behaviour should be changed.  I can see no
>>> downside to such a change.
>>>
>>
>> I agree with you, Rolf, that this is horrid behavior. It is such
>> automatic devices that have made people hate (e.g.) Microsoft
>> Word with a passion.
>>
>> Yet, in R this is a designed-in bug (e.g., feature) that
>> probably can't be changed without making some legacy code not
>> work. But at least, T and F could be removed soon as synonms for
>> TRUE and FALSE. We have seen that "_" was removed as an
>> assignment operator, and the world did not crumble. The use of T
>> and F is no less error-prone, and possibly more.
>
> 	I would definitely support the removal of the use of T
> 	and F for TRUE and FALSE.  Some code would break, but
> 	it would be easy to trace the source of the problem and
> 	easy to fix.
>>
>> The only immediate solution to this accretion of overly clever
>> behavior would be for someone to write new functions (say,
>> Read.csv) that didn't do all those conversions behind the
>> scenes. I'm not about to do that. Are you?
>
>
> 	NFL!!!
>
> 		cheers,
>
> 			Rolf
>
> ######################################################################
> Attention:\ This e-mail message is privileged and confid...{{dropped:9}}
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>
>

-- 
Peter Ehlers
University of Calgary