Hi, On Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 7:19 AM, Matthew Dowle <[email protected]> wrote: > Good question. I was thinking of changing it - in the special case that j > is a single name, it would return a vector. If the grouping columns were > needed just wrap the name with list(). We have a similar rule for i when > that's a single name. The reason the grouping columns are always returned > was for consistency when there are multiple groups in i you probably want > to know which refer to which and we don't want a different type to be > returned depending on data passed to i. > It would be a non-backwards compatible change but we could return the old > bahaviour via an global option. > I get frustrated by it too, and it would be more efficient in those cases > as well.
Instead of special casing syntax like you suggest, doesn't this ave a natural "fit" with w/ the "idiomatic R" `drop=TRUE/FALSE` business? I know it's not currently supported in data.table, but you could imagine always defaulting to FALSE, then in the single column case, you could do: ag["M",age, drop=TRUE] or some such. -steve -- Steve Lianoglou Graduate Student: Computational Systems Biology | Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center | Weill Medical College of Cornell University Contact Info: http://cbio.mskcc.org/~lianos/contact _______________________________________________ datatable-help mailing list [email protected] https://lists.r-forge.r-project.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/datatable-help
