On Feb 12, 2013, at 17:05 , Brian Lee Yung Rowe wrote: > > I thought that the default was the way it was for performance reasons. For > large data.frames or repeated applications, using factors should be faster > for non-trivial strings.
I think not. Historically, it's more like "In statistics we have two kinds of variables, numerical and categorical. OK, so we have the occasional truly character-type variables like name and address, let's handle those as a special case". -- Peter Dalgaard, Professor Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark Phone: (+45)38153501 Email: pd....@cbs.dk Priv: pda...@gmail.com ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
