[R-pkgs] New Hmisc Package Available

[Frank E Harrell Jr]

An updated version of Hmisc is now available from CRAN.  The Web site 
for Hmisc is http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/s/Hmisc.  The change log 
may be found at http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/changelog/Hmisc.html. 
Changes made after 2004-11-24 should be ignored; these will be in the 
next version.

The most major change in Hmisc is that thanks to discussions with a 
highly respected, persistent, and convincing member of the R community, 
Hmisc no longer overrides [.factor to drop unused factor levels by 
default upon subsetting.  You can get the old behavior at any time by 
typing dropUnusedLevels().  A message to that effect appears when you 
attach the package.  Also Hmisc no longer overrides the interaction 
function, as the R builtin version provides the sep argument.  In the 
next version, the summary.formula function will be updated to 
automatically drop unused levels when this is appropriate.

Some other key changes are the addition of bubble plot capability in 
xYplot and addition of the capability of csv.get to correct certain date 
formatting inconsistencies.  sasxport.get now has keep and drop 
arguments to restrict attention to a subset of datasets when many 
datasets are being imported.  Other changes include bug and 
documentation fixes.

-- 
Frank E Harrell Jr   Professor and Chair           School of Medicine
                      Department of Biostatistics   Vanderbilt University