I guess what I suggested violates operator precedence rule. It would only work if somehow the subset operators can recognize the "-" first and treat whatever follows in a different way; i.e., to recognize that -numeric(0) is NOT the same as numeric(0). Oh well... Andy
-----Original Message----- From: Patrick Burns [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, November 14, 2003 12:06 PM To: Liaw, Andy Cc: 'Thomas Lumley'; David Orme; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [R] Vector indices and minus sign Liaw, Andy wrote: From: Thomas Lumley [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ] On Fri, 14 Nov 2003, David Orme wrote: Hi, I got caught out by this behaviour in 1.8.0 and I wondered why this happens: Some anomaly of this sort is unavoidable because R allows positive or negative numeric indices. It can't distinguish between a vector of no positive numbers and a vector of no negative numbers. -thomas I guess this can only work if "-" is treated specially in the subset operators, so that, e.g., x[-"Andy"] would also work. (This would be nice, IMHO.) I agree that x[-c("Andy", "Pat")] would come in handy at times, but x[-numeric(0)] still can not work because the numbers that aren't there might be negative and the minus sign is to put them positive. Pat [A bit OT: I remembered that among the list of bugs fixed in Splus 3.2 for Windows is -0 == 0 is F...] Andy ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help <https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help> [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
