Hi folks,
I actually want to revisit the fix I made here.
Instead of having `use.key` in the signature to unique.data.table (and
duplicated.data.table) to be:
function(x,
incomparables=FALSE,
tolerance=.Machine$double.eps ^ 0.5,
use.key=TRUE, ...)
How about we switch out use.key for a parameter that specifies the
column names to use in the uniqueness check, which defaults to key(x)
to keep backwards compatibility.
For argument's sake (like that?), lets call this parameter `columns`
(by.columns? with.columns? whatever) so:
function(x,
incomparables=FALSE,
tolerance=.Machine$double.eps ^ 0.5,
columns=key(x), ...)
Then:
(1) leaving it alone is the backward compatibile behavior;
(2) Perhaps setting it to NULL will use all columns, and make it
equivalent to unique.data.frame (also the same when x has no key); and
(3) setting it to any other combo of columns uses those columns as the
uniqueness key and filters the rows (only) out of x accordingly.
What do you folks think? Personally I think this is better on all
accounts then just specifying to use the key or not and the only
question in my mind is the name of the argument -- happy to hear other
world views, however, so don't be shy.
Thanks,
-steve
--
Steve Lianoglou
Computational Biologist
Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
Genentech
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