Patrick Burns wrote:
One idea of program design is that users
should be protected against themselves.
It is my experience that users, especially
novices, tend to over-split items rather than
over-clump items. The fact that items are
returned by the same function call would
argue to me that there is a connection between
the items.
Patrick Burns
patr...@burns-stat.com
+44 (0)20 8525 0696
http://www.burns-stat.com
(home of "The R Inferno" and "A Guide for the Unwilling S User")
Hi Gabor, Patrick, Ivo and vQ,
I agree with Patrick and Gabor that it is not needed. IMHO it is good
design that a function (in a mathematical sense) returns ONE object, let
it a single value, a list or an S3/S4 object. This can be passed to
another function as a whole or can be splitted to its parts according to
different needs. If only single parts are required, than I would suggest
to use accessor functions preferably written as generics working on
returned S3 or S4 objects. I'm strongly against going back to the past S
behaviour and I wonder a little bit about this discussion. I like it to
have a clean workspace with only a few objects.
Thomas Petzoldt
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