[R] ave(x, y, FUN=length) produces character output when x is character

[Mike Miller]

On Thu, 25 Dec 2014, Jeff Newmiller wrote:

> You have written a lot, Mike, as though we did not know it.  You are not 
> the only one with math and multiple computing languages under your belt.

I'm not assuming that you and Bert don't know things, but I do expect to 
have a wider audience -- when I search for things, sometimes I find my 
postings from 10 years ago.  I'm probably not the only one.


> The point Bert made is that the concept that a matrix IS-A vector is not 
> just an implementation detail in R... it helps the practitioner keep 
> straight why things like a[3] is perfectly valid when a is a matrix, and 
> why
>
> a*a
>     [,1] [,2]
> [1,]    1    9
> [2,]    4   16
>
> is true. I understand why you are uncomfortable with it, as I was once, 
> but this is how R works so you are only impeding your own effectiveness 
> by clinging to theory on this point.

Sorry, your concepts aren't helping me and I'm not uncomfortable with what 
R is doing.  In fact, what I wrote earlier is that R seems to be much like 
Octave/MATLAB, which I have used even more than I've used R.  The use of 
what Octave calls "fortran indexing" is an example.  We can refer to 
matrix element a[3] in R or element a(3) in Octave and we're referring to 
the same element.  It's also the third element of vec(a).  That doesn't 
mean that 'a' is a vector.  R says that it is not a vector.  That doesn't 
confuse me.  I can refer to the third element of a matrix even if the 
matrix is not a vector.

I don't understand how your concept helps in understanding a*a.  It's an 
element-by-element product (also called Hadamard product).  In Octave it 
would be a.*a.  The matrix product in R is a%*%a and in Octave it is a*a. 
I find nothing confusing about any of this and I don't see how conceiving 
of 'a' as a vector helps at all.

The difference between our concepts is that this makes no sense within 
your framework where you think of a matrix as being a vector:

> a <- matrix(1:4, 2,2)
> is.vector(a)
[1] FALSE

But to me it makes perfect sense because 'a' is a matrix and a matrix is 
not a vector.  We might say that it contains a vector, or that the 
elements of the matrix are constructed from the elements of a vector, but 
not that the matrix is a vector.  It is a different class of object:

> class(a)
[1] "matrix"

Mike