[R] I don't understand the 'order' function

Julio Sergio juliosergio at gmail.com
Tue Apr 16 19:51:41 CEST 2013


I thought I've understood the 'order' function, using simple examples like:

   order(c(5,4,-2))
   [1] 3 2 1

However, I arrived to the following example:

   order(c(2465, 2255, 2085, 1545, 1335, 1210, 920, 210, 210, 505, 1045)) 
   [1]  8  9 10  7 11  6  5  4  3  2  1

and I was completely perplexed!
Shouldn't the output vector be  11 10 9 8 7 6 4 1 2 3 5 ?
Do I have a damaged version of R?

I became still more astonished when I used the sort function and got the 
right answer: 

   sort(c(2465, 2255, 2085, 1545, 1335, 1210,  920,  210,  210,  505, 1045))
   [1]  210  210  505  920 1045 1210 1335 1545 2085 2255 2465
since 'sort' documentation claims to be using 'order' to establish the right 
order.

Please help me to understand all this!

  Thanks,

  -Sergio.



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