Dear developeRs (and other abuseRs ;-),
I would like to contribute a patch against functions head() and tail() of
package utils to allow for a negative 'n' argument. This allows to extract
all but the first/last 'n' elements/rows/lines of an object, similar to
the "drop" operator of APL. [1]
I put the patched head.R and head.Rd files, along with diff files in
http://vgoulet.act.ulaval.ca/pub/R/
The differences were obtained against today's version of r-devel (more
specifically revision 30277 of head.R and revision 30915 of head.Rd).
Some comments:
- The current version of head() and tail() will accept a vector of length > 1
for argument 'n' but will silently use the smallest value. This became
awkward to reproduce in my versions and did not seem interesting anyway.
Instead, I added an error message if length(n) > 1.
- I used the word "scalar" in the aforementioned error message to mean a
vector of length 1. Perhaps is this not the correct R terminology?
- I added a 'addrownums = TRUE' argument to head() used when n < 0, similar to
tail() with n > 0. This required to write separate methods for
classes 'data.frame' and 'matrix'.
- The 'function' methods are not modified.
- In the man page, the 'function' method was not documented in the usage
section. Done now.
- I don't think the patch would break any existing code, except code using the
(undocumented) "feature" mentioned in my first remark, above.
I hope you will find my (albeit small) contribution useful.
Best regards,
-----
[1] See previous messages to r-devel by myself
<https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2005-April/032881.html>
and Bill Venables
<https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2005-May/033081.html>
--
Vincent Goulet, Associate Professor
École d'actuariat
Université Laval, Québec
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://vgoulet.act.ulaval.ca
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