The prevailing opinion seemed to be that is.na() might be better (safer) but x <- NA is much clearer to understand. Can I relatively safely use the easy form, or is it better to remember (the hard way) the safer version? Has the discussion continued privately or just stopped here?
Personally I still find the fragments below (taken from the thread) very counter intuitive, not to say scary.
x <- 1:10 is.na(x) <- 1:5
and
is.na(x) <- FALSE
It's very hard to understand what happens (as layman) because the assignment seems to reverse in meaning in the first example (actually taking indices 1:5 of x and assigning those the value NA) whereas in the second case it's not obvious what happens to x: will it get the value FALSE or will the original value remain(*).
IMHO the <- NA construct is much easier to understand and should be made safe in all possible situations (whatever the underlying safety problem or other difficulties might be).
kind regards, Paul
(*) Such a remark will probably lead to some kind of reprimand because it's probably somewhere within the 10e6 manual pages but I'm trying my luck here.
-- Paul Lemmens NICI, University of Nijmegen ASCII Ribbon Campaign /"\ Montessorilaan 3 (B.01.03) Against HTML Mail \ / NL-6525 HR Nijmegen X The Netherlands / \ Phonenumber +31-24-3612648 Fax +31-24-3616066
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