[R-pkg-devel] tibbles are not data frames

[Stefan McKinnon Høj-Edwards]

Hi Göran,

Could you please elaborate on which kind of subsetting that Hadley dislikes?
I am yet to encounter operations on data frames that are not possible on
tribbles.

Kindly,
Stefan McKinnon Hoj-Edwards

Stefan McKinnon Høj-Edwards
ph.d. Genetics
+44 (0)776 231 2464
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Skype: stefan_edwards

2017-09-26 8:30 GMT+01:00 Göran Broström <goran.brostrom at umu.se>:

> I am beginning to get complaints from users of my CRAN packages
> (especially 'eha') to the effect that they get error messages like "Error:
> Unsupported use of matrix or array for column indexing".
>
> It turns out that they are sticking in tibbles into functions that expect
> data frames as input. And I am using the kind of subsetting that Hadley
> dislikes (eha is an old package, much older than tibbles). It is of course
> a simple matter to change the code so it handles both data frames and
> tibbles correctly, but this affects many functions, and it will take some
> time. And when the next guy introduces 'troubles' as an improvement of
> 'tibbles', I will have to rewrite the code again.
>
> While I like Hadley's way of doing it, I think it is a mistake to let a
> tibble also be of class data frame. To me it is a matter of inheritance and
> backwards compability: A tibble should add nice things to a data frame, not
> change basic behaviour, in order to call itself a data frame.
>
> Is it correct to let a tibble be of class "data.frame"?
>
> Göran Broström
>
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