Thank you gentlemen, I really appreciate all the comments

On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 2:19 PM, Bert Gunter <gunter.berton@gene.com> wrote:

> Bogdan:
>
> I believe your query demonstrates the hazards of jumping into R without
> first making an effort to read at least some of the supporting docs -- in
> this case, I think, "An Intro to R" would have sufficed.
>
> R is not a video game nor even Excel. It is very powerful and quite
> sophisticated software for doing some pretty hairy stuff, implemented in
> its
> "raw" form as an interactive programming language (apologies if this is not
> the appropriate technical term). So, as I think you found out, it can make
> some pretty daunting demands on a beginner even for simple things. If you
> really need it's power and flexibility, once you've climbed the learning
> curve, it's an extraordinarily productive tool. If you are just a casual
> reader who doesn't need all that complex functionality, it's probably not
> worth the effort or frustration.
>
> Anyway, the answer to your question -- which may require you to read the
> docs to understand -- is that in R a "table" from read.table() is actually
> a
> data frame, which is also a special kind of list. As the error message
> says,
> as.numeric() cannot coerce recursive objects (which is what a list is) to
> simple numeric vectors.
>
> Bert Gunter
> Genentech Nonclinical Biostatisics
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-help-bounces@r-project.org [mailto:r-help-bounces@r-project.org]
> On
> Behalf Of Bogdan Tanasa
> Sent: Wednesday, August 19, 2009 1:59 PM
> To: r-help@r-project.org
> Subject: [R] a naive question
>
> Hi, and my apologies for the following very naive question : I would like
> to
> read a column of numbers in R and plot a histogram.
>
> eg :
>
> x<-read.table("txSTART");
> y<-as.numeric(x);
>
> and I do obtain the error : Error: (list) object cannot be coerced to type
> 'double'. Please could you let me know the way to fix it.
>
> thanks,
>
> bogdan
> <r-help@r-project.org>
>
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>
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