Continuing to beat the greasy spot in the road where the dead horse used to be....
1) I know that the people building r are working on bigger and better things than this silly question and I appreciate the existence of this complicated package that was dropped in my lap for free. 2) Tony Platt succinctly pointed out one of the underlying 'problems' (possibly in my understanding): > #this is a perfectly reasonable r object > some.weird.object<-factor(c("a","b","c")) > #this is an internal r function acting on an object > typeof(some.weird.object) [1] "integer" > #this is a primitive r function acting on an object > is.numeric(some.weird.object) [1] FALSE > Do these functions behave in a design consistent manor?? Can a single r object simultaneously be of type integer and NOT numeric?? If this is intentional can someone explain why? I don't think this has anything to do with taking the median of a factor (median calls mode that calls typeof). It just requires a sufficiently complex object, such as factor, before we start seeing this behavior. I wasn't clever enough to come up with examples of non-factor objects that produced this behavior so I am curious if this problem is internal to factor or to the functions themselves. Thanks Bob -----Original Message----- From: Duncan Murdoch [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, November 02, 2003 9:40 AM To: Peter Dalgaard Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [R] Weird problem with median on a factor On 02 Nov 2003 12:50:37 +0100, you wrote: >(Arguably, sorting an unordered factor ought to Verboten as well, >though!) No, arbitrarily assigning an ordering and using that to sort is a useful thing in many situations, e.g. searching. Duncan Murdoch ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help