Hi all, I've been pondering the following. One of my coworkers doesn't like data.table because of the fact that he doesn't like factors. Namely things like adding a new value to a factor field only to have it choke because it isn't one of the levels. Also often times the variable is something like a list of subnested categories, and sometimes he will do a substitute to go up a level in the categories. This is a pain when they are factors.
Suffie to say, his work flow just makes a lot more sense to him when they are characters and he doesn't have to worry about underlying levels and the like. How hard would an "implicit factor" be? Something that to the user behaves exactly like a normal character variable, but internally data.frame is keeping the mapping of character values to integer codes somewhere behind the scene. This is my thrust towards a hack at allowing character vectors to be keys. If the real right way is much simpler than what this would take please ignore me. -Chris _______________________________________________ datatable-help mailing list [email protected] https://lists.r-forge.r-project.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/datatable-help
