On 12/02/2013 1:47 PM, Hervé Pagès wrote:
On 02/12/2013 08:20 AM, peter dalgaard wrote:
>
> 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".
<sarcasm>
Since character vectors are sooooo bad and people use them where
they should instead use a factor, I propose to go all the way and
by adding the stringsAsFactors arg to character() too. That way
people are put on the right track from the very start.
</sarcasm>
I think you are misreading what Peter wrote. He wasn't defending that
point of view, he was describing it.
No seriously, if my variable is categorical, it's already in a factor
and that's how I pass it to data.frame(). But if I have it in a
character vector, it's because that's how I want it. It's my choice.
How could anybody ever think that having data.frame() alter his/her
data is a good thing?
Please *remove* the stringsAsFactors arg of data.frame() in R 3.0.
You'll do a big favor to your user base.
That's a really bad suggestion -- it would break code for people who set
stringsAsFactors=FALSE as well as those who rely on the current default
behaviour. We certainly won't do that.
Duncan Murdoch
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