[Rd] matrixStats: Extend to arrays too (Was: Re: Suggestion: Adding quick rowMin and rowMax functions to base package)

[William Dunlap]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: h.wickham at gmail.com [mailto:h.wickham at gmail.com] On 
> Behalf Of Hadley Wickham
> Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2011 9:21 AM
> To: William Dunlap
> Cc: Tim Hesterberg; Henrik Bengtsson; r-devel at r-project.org
> Subject: Re: [Rd] matrixStats: Extend to arrays too (Was: Re: 
> Suggestion: Adding quick rowMin and rowMax functions to base package)
> 
> >> You mean rowMaxes, right?  Or is the rule to add an s, not to
> >> pluralise?
> >
> > In S+ we chose to just append the 's' instead of making
> > everyone worry about the vagarities of English spelling
> > and pluralization rules.  We also have 'groupAnys' and
> > 'igroupAnys' (and should have {row,col}Anys, but we don't).
> 
> I think that's the strongest argument for sticking with singular nouns
> for function names - English pluralisations are complex and arbitrary,
> but just adding an s is going to look horrible for any native speaker.
> 
> Hadley

That is a good argument, but the horse has been out
of the barn for quite a while: rowSums has been in R
since at least 2007 (2.6.1 is the oldest version of R
I have installed) and in S+ since at least 1998 (S+ 5.0,
the oldest I have installed).

There are lots of R and S+ functions with plurals in
the name (computeRestarts, objects, sys.calls, ...)
and I think they generally make sense to be plural.
(However, why is dim() singular and dimnames() plural?
Their results generally have the same length for a
given object.)

Bill Dunlap
Spotfire, TIBCO Software
wdunlap tibco.com 


> 
> 
> -- 
> Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair
> Department of Statistics / Rice University
> http://had.co.nz/
>