On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 12:45 PM, William Dunlap <wdun...@tibco.com> wrote: >> ... adding the ability to concat >> strings with '+' would be a relatively simple addition (no pun intended) > to >> the code base I believe. With a lot of other languages supporting this > kind >> of concatenation, this is what surprised me most when first learning R. > > Wow! R has a lot of surprising features and I would have thought > this would be quite a way down the list.
Well, it is hard to guess what users and people in general find surprising. As '+' is used for string concatenation in essentially all major scripting (and many other) languages, personally I am not surprised that this is surprising for people. :) > How would this new '+' deal with factors, as paste does or as the current > '+' > does? The same as before. It would not change the behavior for other classes, only basic characters. > Would number+string and string+number cause errors (as in current > '+' in R and python) or coerce both to strings (as in current R:paste and > in perl's '+'). Would cause errors, exactly as it does right now. > Having '+' work on all types of data can let improperly imported data > get further into the system before triggering an error. Nobody is asking for this. Only characters, not all types of data. > I see lots of > errors > reported on this list that are due to read.table interpreting text as > character > strings instead of the numbers that the user expected. Detecting that > error as early as possible is good. Isn't that a problem with read.table then? Detecting it there would be the earliest possible, no? Gabor [...] ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
