[Rd] Typo in documentation for reshape?

[Michael Dewey]

At 19:10 14/11/2012, peter dalgaard wrote:

>On Nov 14, 2012, at 19:15 , Michael Dewey wrote:
>
> > When I go ?reshape I get told, amongst other things
> >
> > new.row.names
> > logical; if TRUE and direction = "wide", create new row names in 
> long format from the values of the id and time variables.
> >
> > This seems to me to be illogical, surely it should read direction = "long"?
> >
> > Reading the code and observing its behaviour I find that (a) the 
> default for new.row.names is in fact NULL (b) the default seems to 
> give the behaviour described above for TRUE (c) it is tested in the 
> code only as if(is.null(new.row.names)) or if(!is.null(new.row.names))
> >
> > Note I am not complaining about the behaviour, it does what I 
> would want and what seems to me to be the natural thing but I do 
> not think it is quite as documented.
> >
>
>I believe this, and a bit more, is in bug #15102.
>
>The report hasn't been acted upon, but not been dismissed either, so 
>presumably there's general agreement that something is wrong, but 
>someone needs to check the suggested fixups in detail.
>
>It's quite amusing how issues can go unnoticed for years and then be 
>reported by two different people within a week. Or is there perhaps 
>a more direct reason that the two of you should happen to be on the same page?

I am not sure how to find who authored the bug report but I have not 
used reshape for a while and I found the documentation issue this 
afternoon and so must assume this is just a coincidence. As I implied 
originally I do not think it is a bug, more of an undocumented feature.


>--
>Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
>Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
>Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
>Phone: (+45)38153501
>Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com

Michael Dewey
info at aghmed.fsnet.co.uk
http://www.aghmed.fsnet.co.uk/home.html