On Sun, 22 Apr 2007, ivo welch wrote: > yes, this was what I was asking for. I had the notion that one could > tag almost anything with a name, and did not appreciate the scope for > confusion. thank you for the explanation. regards, /ivo >
You haven't told us why you want this behavior. If what you want is a tag that will follow d$columnname around when you assign it to another object, you can add an attribute that has the tag in it. i.e. > df <- as.data.frame(diag(3)) > for (i in names(df)) attr( df[[ i ]], "my.name" ) <- i > df.v1 <- df$V1 > attr(df.v1,"my.name") [1] "V1" > > > On 4/22/07, Duncan Murdoch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> On 4/22/2007 5:46 PM, ivo welch wrote: >>> dear R wizards --- would it make sense for names(d$columnname) to be >>> "columnname"? I can preserve the columnname through x=subset(dataset, >>> select="columnname"), of course, but it would seem that x=d$columnname >>> could also do this. No? Sincerely, /iaw >> >> If I understand what you're asking, I don't think so. >> >> d$columnname >> >> extracts an element of the list d. It's typically some sort of vector, >> and vectors don't know what their own name is. >> >> names(d$columnname) >> >> looks for a names attribute on that vector. If it doesn't have one, >> you'll get NULL. >> >> There are plenty of functions in R which depend on the form of the >> argument passed to them, not just its value, but we shouldn't add more >> without a very good reason. The change you ask for would mess up the >> following calculation: >> >> > x <- 1:26 >> > names(x) <- letters >> > d <- list(columnname=x) >> > names(d$columnname) >> [1] "a" "b" "c" "d" "e" "f" "g" "h" "i" "j" "k" "l" "m" "n" "o" "p" >> "q" "r" >> [19] "s" "t" "u" "v" "w" "x" "y" "z" >> >> >> Duncan Murdoch >> > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list > 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. > Charles C. Berry (858) 534-2098 Dept of Family/Preventive Medicine E mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] UC San Diego http://biostat.ucsd.edu/~cberry/ La Jolla, San Diego 92093-0901 ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list 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.