>>>>> "RichOK" == Richard A O'Keefe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >>>>> on Mon, 13 Dec 2004 10:56:48 +1300 (NZDT) writes:
RichOK> I asked: >> In this discussion of seq(), can anyone explain to me >> _why_ seq(to=n) and seq(length=3) have different types? RichOK> Martin Maechler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> RichOK> replied: well, the explantion isn't hard: look at RichOK> seq.default :-) RichOK> That's the "efficient cause", I was after the "final RichOK> cause". That is, I wasn't asking "what is it about RichOK> the system which MAKES this happen" but "why does RichOK> anyone WANT this to happen"? sure, I did understand you quite well -- I was trying to joke and used the " :-) " to point the joking .. MM> now if that really makes your *life* simpler, MM> what does that tell us about your life ;-) :-) { even more " :-) " !! } RichOK> It tells you I am revising someone else's e-book RichOK> about S to describe R. The cleaner R is, the easier RichOK> that part of my life gets. of course, and actually I do agree for my life too, since as you may believe, parts of my life *are* influenced by R. Apologize for my unsuccessful attempts to joking.. RichOK> seq: from, to, by, length[.out], along[.with] MM> I'm about to fix this (documentation, not code). RichOK> Please don't. There's a lot of text out there: RichOK> tutorials, textbooks, S on-inline documentation, &c RichOK> which states over and over again that the arguments RichOK> are 'along' and 'with'. you meant 'along' and 'length' yes. And everyone can continue to use the abbreviated form as I'm sure nobody will introduce a 'seq' method that uses *multiple* argument names starting with "along" or "length" (such that the partial argument name matching could become a problem). RichOK> Change the documentation, and people will start RichOK> writing length.out, and will that port to S-Plus? RichOK> (Serious question: I don't know.) yes, as Peter has confirmed already. Seriously, I think we wouldn't even have started using the ugly ".with" or ".out" appendices, wouldn't it have been for S-plus compatibility {and Peter has also given the explanation why there *had* been a good reason for these appendices in the past}. Martin ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel