>>>>> Henrik Bengtsson <henrik.bengts...@gmail.com>
>>>>> on Fri, 11 Dec 2015 08:20:55 -0800 writes:
> On Fri, Dec 11, 2015 at 8:10 AM, David Winsemius <dwinsem...@comcast.net>
wrote:
>>
>>> On Dec 11, 2015, at 5:38 AM, Dario Beraldi <dario.bera...@gmail.com>
wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi All,
>>>
>>> I'd like to understand the reason why stopifnot(logical(0) == x) doesn't
>>> (never?) throw an exception, at least in these cases:
>>
>> The usual way to test for a length-0 logical object is to use length():
>>
>> x <- logical(0)
>>
>> stopifnot( !length(x) & mode(x)=="logical" )
> I found
> stopifnot(!length(x), mode(x) == "logical")
> more helpful when troubleshooting, because it will tell you whether
> it's !length(x) or mode(x) == "logical" that is FALSE. It's as if you
> wrote:
> stopifnot(!length(x))
> stopifnot(mode(x) == "logical")
> /Henrik
Yes, indeed, thank you Henrik --- and Jeff Newmiller who's nice
humorous reply added other relevant points.
As author stopifnot(), I do agree with Dario's "gut feeling"
that stopifnot() "somehow ought to do the right thing"
in cases such as
stopifnot(dim(x) == c(3,4))
which is really subtle version of his cases
{But the gut feeling is wrong, as I argue from now on}.
Someone writing the above would want stopifnot() to stop in the
case where x is a simple vector instead of a
matrix/data.frame/... with dimensions c(3,4) ... but it will not
because, as Bill or Jeff explained, "the empty set is always
true", and so yes indeed, you have to care about length-0
expressions in stopifnot().
Indeed, in the past, I had thought of "improving" stopifnot()
by giving a warning or even stop() for logical(0) expressions,
but I quickly dismissed that idea after some experiments.
My conclusion: Breaking such a fundamental lemma of logic as
"the empty set is always true"
will lead to all kinds of illogical situations ... so don't do that!
Martin Maechler,
ETH Zurich
______________________________________________
R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
