I have been bitten by what is clearly described on the help page for
'sample', namely sampling from a population of size one. I agree that it is
convenient to have an exception if 'length(x) == 1', but my suggestion is
to enforce the exception only if 'x' is numeric. In any case, if x is not
numeric and of length 1, all you get is an error message.
I would like 'sample("tre", 1)' to return "tre", and 'sample(3, 1)' to
return a natural number less than 4. It seems easy to achieve that by
changing the line
if (length(x) == 1 && x >= 1) {
to
if (length(x) == 1 && is.numeric(x) && x >= 1) {
in 'sample'.
Isn't that a good idea? An alternative suggestion would be to implement
'resample' (from the examples) in 'base'.
Göran
PS. Congratulations to the Core Team for reaching an excellent 2.0.0!
--
Göran Broström tel: +46 90 786 5223
Department of Statistics fax: +46 90 786 6614
Umeå University http://www.stat.umu.se/egna/gb/
SE-90187 Umeå, Sweden e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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