R-alpha: factors ...

[Thomas Lumley]

On Wed, 21 May 1997, Kurt Hornik wrote:

> Perhaps someone can enlighten me here:
> R> x <- factor(LETTERS[1:3])
> [1] "factor"
> 
> S-PLUS has
> > x <- factor(LETTERS[1:3])
> > mode(unclass(x))
> [1] "numeric"

It's a feature. R has a primitive factor type, S-PLUS doesn't and so loses
factorness with unclass(). You can use as.numeric() to coerce to numeric
in either system. 


Thomas Lumley
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