Yes, that is one scenario and for that we need a better class (possibly a better data.frame class).
But there are other scenarios for which a special class for the column is better. Which is why I asked. > Steve Dutky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> I have a function that manipulates a list of numeric and character >> components of equal length and wants to return a data.frame. >> ... >> How can I get the columns Char1, Char2, (...CharN) returned coerced to >> character and not factor? > > Prof Brian Ripley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> ... We should ask why you want character columns in a data frame?... > > I think Steve's situation is very common. It points up a long-standing > gap in the S language, namely a class of objects for tabular data that > is less restrictive than data.frame or matrix. Data frames are really > designed for statistics (thus their inclination towards factors and > valid column names), while matrices can only handle a single mode of > data (numeric or character). > > In my own world, I've "implemented" this "class" as lists of > equal-length vectors, and built many tools for it that mirror > read.table, write.table, merge, cbind, rbind, etc. Except that I've > done it sloppily, without using real classes or > constructors/validators/methods. > > It would be nice to have a real class "table" (maybe data.frame would > extend it?). But no, I'm not volunteering to build it. :-/ > -- > -- David Brahm ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) -- 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 ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
