Yesterday I was biten by a feature, which I find too dangerous. I wanted to use a factor `Subject� as index into a data frame, whose row names were the levels of this factor. So there a 2 different possible interpretations of this: Either Subject is coerced to numeric or to character. The intended interpretation was, of course, `as.character(Subject)'. R did `as.numeric(Subject)�. This will not cause a semantic error, when the levels of Subject happen to be in numeric order; so it will be unnoticed quite often.
I propose to issue a warning whenever a factor is implicitly coerced, at least in an ambiguous context. ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
