On 20-May-05 Uwe Ligges wrote: > All possible changes to T/F (both removing the meaning of > TRUE/FALSE in a clean session and making them reserved words) > would break code of lots of users.
Just wanted to point out that there's another (darker) side to this: code that produces bad results without the users even realizing it. Personally, I would clearly prefer lots of broken code to mistakes caused by T/TRUE and F/FALSE. Hypothetically, if whatever=T/F were forbidden and only whatever=TRUE/FALSE were allowed, all the code could be fixed with a simple sed script: for F in `ls *.r` do mv $F $F.$$ sed -e 's/=T,/=TRUE,/g' -e 's/=F,/=FALSE,/g' -e 's/=T)/=TRUE)/g' -e 's/=F)/=FALSE)/g' $F.$$ > $F rm $F.$$ done -----Original Message----- From: Uwe Ligges [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, May 20, 2005 2:39 AM To: John Fox Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: [R] R annoyances Dear John, I have not expected to cause that many traffic and largish discussion. What I tried to point out is that: - a "programmer" should know that one has to use TRUE / FALSE in code in order to make it work generaly which is also checked by R CMD check. - a "user" simply typing some lines in order to look at the data can shortly write T or F instead. where "programmer" and "user" are not well defined and probably undistinguishable according to Chambers (1998). I'd call people using [..., drop=FALSE] "programmer" here, since the code is probably used inside functions. S-PLUS compatibility (T/F) has to be considered as well. All possible changes to T/F (both removing the meaning of TRUE/FALSE in a clean session and making them reserved words) would break code of lots of users. With a common amount of statistical uncertainty I think it might be too late for changes ... Best, Uwe John Fox wrote: > Dear Uwe, > > I've often wondered why T and F aren't reserved words in R as TRUE and FALSE > are. Perhaps there's some use of T and F as variables, but that seems > ill-advised. > > Regards, > John > > -------------------------------- > John Fox > Department of Sociology > McMaster University > Hamilton, Ontario > Canada L8S 4M4 > 905-525-9140x23604 > http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox > -------------------------------- > > >>-----Original Message----- >>From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >>[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Uwe Ligges >>Sent: Thursday, May 19, 2005 10:08 AM >>To: Chalasani, Prasad >>Cc: [email protected] >>Subject: Re: [R] R annoyances >> >>Chalasani, Prasad wrote: >> >> >>>Thanks all for pointing out that I can use >>> mtx[,1,drop=F] >> >> >>Which, for example, won't work for >> F <- 10.25 >> >>---> drop=FALSE ! >> ^^^^^ >> >>Uwe Ligges >> >> >> >> ______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
