On Mon, 13 Jun 2005, BXC (Bendix Carstensen) wrote:
> The key to solving your problem is that read.spss per default
> gives you a *list* and not a *dataframe* (can anyone explain this
> choice of default?).
>
The reason for the default is speed.
It's possible that the default could be changed to make it easier to use
for people who don't read the help page. I haven't measured the speed
difference recently, but it used to be significant. IIRC the reasoning
was that you would often want just a few variables from a data file, in
which case subsetting before creating a data frame was a worthwhile
saving.
I have certainly had complaints that reading just a few variables from a
large Stata file is slow (because it does produce a data frame first)
-thomas
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