On Sat, 4 Sep 2004 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> I have made the 3-d case do the same as the vector case, which is what the
> C code clearly intended (a goto label was in the wrong place).
>
> This leaves the bigger question of the right thing to do. I note that data
> frames give an error when any indices are NA.
One case is unambiguous and common:
x[ind] <- val
where `val' is of length one. I've written code to ban all other
subassignments involving NAs. Once I fixed occurrences in R itself
(notably in ifelse), only three problems remain in tests over the CRAN
packages
< Running examples in ape-Ex.R failed.
< > ### * popsize
area[a == 0] <- stepfunction[a == 0]
< Running examples in RandomFields-Ex.R failed.
< > ### * ShowModels
expr[pmatch(covlist, namen)] <- exprlist
< Running examples in sm-Ex.R failed.
< > ### * sm.sphere
z[xyzok < 0] <- (za - zb)[xyzok < 0]
The first and third are a typical usage, where R makes more sense than S.
[Worryingly, sm was written for S-PLUS and would seem to be incorrect
there.]
So in R 2.0.0 we will have
\section{NAs in indexing}{
When subscripting, a numerical, logical or character \code{NA} picks
an unknown element and so returns \code{NA} in the corresponding
element of a logical, integer, numeric, complex or character result,
and \code{NULL} for a list.
When replacing (that is using subscripting on the lhs of an
assignment) \code{NA} does not select any element to be replaced. As
there is ambiguity as to whether an element of the rhs should
be used or not (and \R handled this inconsistently prior to \R 2.0.0),
this is only allowed if the rhs value is of length one (so the two
interpretations would have the same outcome).
}
--
Brian D. Ripley, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595
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