[R-sig-ME] Help file inconsistency for VarCorr in lme4?

[S Ellison]

>   This does look like a documentation typo.  Will be fixed in 
> lme4.0 on R-forge; we probably won't release another version 
> of lme4 to CRAN before the 1.0 release.

No problem; the present format is reasonably easily deciphered, especially if you have an older version's help file about.

An aside, though; I found it because I was trying to get numbers out of VarCorr for further use (specifically, I needed the SDs rather than variances), and made sure I was getting the right data by comparing with the summary output. 
Which leads me to a suggestion. All the numbers (at least for my model) are packaged much more tidily in the formatted table of random effects in summary() for lmer objects. That table, though, is apparently in character format. Wouldn't it be more useful to create that as a numerical data frame and use the default methods for data frame output to display it, or to format at print time? That way the summary object would hold the numbers, and we could get the random effect variances or sd's easily from the summary object..

Steve E


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