The main usage case I've personally encountered is data presentation (for either self or others), where I would sometimes organize data like so:
category1 name,colname1,colname2,category2 name,colname1,colname2 ....numbersandstuff.... Also, in general there are many cases I brought up above that generate duplicate names, and I definitely don't want either lost columns or renamed columns as a result - both are data loss that I don't appreciate. On Sat, Nov 2, 2013 at 7:10 PM, Steve Lianoglou <[email protected]>wrote: > Hi, > > On Sat, Nov 2, 2013 at 8:41 AM, Arunkumar Srinivasan > <[email protected]> wrote: > [snip] > > Overall, I agree keeping duplicate names may help some users. But then, > the > > potential side-effects should be marked with warnings/errors distinctly, > in > > all cases (and preferably documented). > [/snip] > > I guess I must have missed it, but has anyone anywhere (in this > thread, a FR or something) actually present a (concrete) compelling > situation where allowing duplicate column names was actually useful? > > I'm hard pressed to come up with any situation where (purposefully) > keeping duplicate column names in a data.table has more benefit than > downside. Seems to me that if this ever happens, it most certainly > would be by mistake. > > Can someone help me out here? > > In the case of cbinding two data.tables together that end up having > two duplicate names, I'd imagine unique-ing the names of the > data.tables and firing a warning that this was done would be most > useful (uniqueness priority would be from left to right as the > data.tables are passed into the cbind call) > > -steve > > -- > Steve Lianoglou > Computational Biologist > Bioinformatics and Computational Biology > Genentech >
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