[R] Converting the time in a numeric value

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On Sun, Jul 10, 2011 at 3:55 AM, peter dalgaard <pdalgd at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Jul 10, 2011, at 09:44 , peter dalgaard wrote:
>
>>
>> On Jul 10, 2011, at 09:15 , Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
>>
>> article on date-times (not the un-refereed one in R-News 4/1) to gain more understanding.
>>
>> Just to clarify, R News articles were in general refereed (single reviewer), at least in the later years, but the one you're referring to is a "Help desk" item.
>
> ...and --- current editors of The R Journal have access to R News archives --- the item in question did in fact have an external reviewer.
>

Furthermore its importance is that it recommended a viable approach to
using date/time classes which avoids many problems that  could
otherwise wind up wasting large amounts of time through inappropriate
use of those classes.

The second problem that it addresses is that using the date time
classes can be tricky and it gives a table of idioms that can be used
straight away to do many common date time manipulations.

I personally faced these problems in earlier days of R and decided to
contribute this so that others would have an easier time of it and not
have to waste the time I did on simple date/time problems.  I think it
was successful in that regard as postings about date/time problems
sharply fell off in the r-help list after it was published.

Since that article many improvements in R have been made yet the main
points and most or all of the detail still remain valid and useful.

-- 
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