[Rd] Shouldn't vector indexing with negative out-of-range index give an error?
Hervé Pagès
hpages at fredhutch.org
Wed May 6 19:53:27 CEST 2015
Hi,
On 05/06/2015 09:04 AM, Henrik Bengtsson wrote:
> On Wed, May 6, 2015 at 1:33 AM, Martin Maechler
> <maechler at lynne.stat.math.ethz.ch> wrote:
>>>>>>> John Chambers <jmc at stat.stanford.edu>
>>>>>>> on Tue, 5 May 2015 08:39:46 -0700 writes:
>>
>> > When someone suggests that we "might have had a reason" for some peculiarity in the original S, my usual reaction is "Or else we never thought of the problem".
>> > In this case, however, there is a relevant statement in the 1988 "blue book". In the discussion of subscripting (p 358) the definition for negative i says: "the indices consist of the elements of seq(along=x) that do not match any elements in -i".
>>
>> > Suggesting that no bounds checking on -i takes place.
>>
>> > John
>>
>> Indeed!
>> Thanks a lot John, for the perspective and clarification!
>>
>> I'm committing a patch to the documentation now.
>
> Thank you both and also credits to Dongcan Jiang for pointing out to
> me that errors were indeed not generated in this case.
>
> I agree with the decision. It's interesting to notice that now the
> only way an error is generated is when index-vector subsetting is done
> using mixed positive and negative indices, e.g. x[c(-1,1)].
This is why in situations where I need to extract a single element from
an atomic vector I use [[ instead of [. It's safer (performs
bound-checking), a little bit faster (at least last time I checked), and
drops the name of the element.
BTW did you know that one can use a negative index with [[ on a
vector of length 2?
> c(a=2, b=6)[[-1]]
[1] 6
> c(a=2, b=6)[[-2]]
[1] 2
> list(a=22, b=6:5)[[-1]]
[1] 6 5
> list(a=22, b=6:5)[[-2]]
[1] 22
> list(a=22, b=6:5)[[c(-1, -2)]]
[1] 6
> list(a=22, b=6:5)[[c(-1, -1)]]
Also works with [[<-:
> x <- list(a=22, b=6:5)
> x[[c(-1, -2)]] <- 99L
> x
$a
[1] 22
$b
[1] 99 5
Not that I ever needed that "feature" though...
Cheers,
H.
>
> /Henrik
>
>> Martin
>>
>>
>> > On May 5, 2015, at 7:01 AM, Martin Maechler <maechler at lynne.stat.math.ethz.ch> wrote:
>>
>> >>>>>>> Henrik Bengtsson <henrik.bengtsson at ucsf.edu>
>> >>>>>>> on Mon, 4 May 2015 12:20:44 -0700 writes:
>> >>
>> >>> In Section 'Indexing by vectors' of 'R Language Definition'
>> >>> (http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-lang.html#Indexing-by-vectors)
>> >>> it says:
>> >>
>> >>> "Integer. All elements of i must have the same sign. If they are
>> >>> positive, the elements of x with those index numbers are selected. If
>> >>> i contains negative elements, all elements except those indicated are
>> >>> selected.
>> >>
>> >>> If i is positive and exceeds length(x) then the corresponding
>> >>> selection is NA. A negative out of bounds value for i causes an error.
>> >>
>> >>> A special case is the zero index, which has null effects: x[0] is an
>> >>> empty vector and otherwise including zeros among positive or negative
>> >>> indices has the same effect as if they were omitted."
>> >>
>> >>> However, that "A negative out of bounds value for i causes an error"
>> >>> in the second paragraph does not seem to apply. Instead, R silently
>> >>> ignore negative indices that are out of range. For example:
>> >>
>> >>>> x <- 1:4
>> >>>> x[-9L]
>> >>> [1] 1 2 3 4
>> >>>> x[-c(1:9)]
>> >>> integer(0)
>> >>>> x[-c(3:9)]
>> >>> [1] 1 2
>> >>
>> >>>> y <- as.list(1:4)
>> >>>> y[-c(1:9)]
>> >>> list()
>> >>
>> >>> Is the observed non-error the correct behavior and therefore the
>> >>> documentation is incorrect, or is it vice verse? (...or is it me
>> >>> missing something)
>> >>
>> >>> I get the above on R devel, R 3.2.0, and as far back as R 2.11.0
>> >>> (haven't check earlier versions).
>> >>
>> >> Thank you, Henrik!
>> >>
>> >> I've checked further back: The change happened between R 2.5.1 and R 2.6.0.
>> >>
>> >> The previous behavior was
>> >>
>> >>> (1:3)[-(3:5)]
>> >> Error: subscript out of bounds
>> >>
>> >> If you start reading NEWS.2, you see a *lot* of new features
>> >> (and bug fixes) in the 2.6.0 news, but from my browsing, none of
>> >> them mentioned the new behavior as feature.
>> >>
>> >> Let's -- for a moment -- declare it a bug in the code, i.e., not
>> >> in the documentation:
>> >>
>> >> - As 2.6.0 happened quite a while ago (Oct. 2007),
>> >> we could wonder how much R code will break if we fix the bug.
>> >>
>> >> - Is the R package authors' community willing to do the necessary
>> >> cleanup in their packages ?
>> >>
>> >> ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> Now, after reading the source code for a while, and looking at
>> >> the changes, I've found the log entry
>> >>
>> >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> >> r42123 | ihaka | 2007-07-05 02:00:05 +0200 (Thu, 05 Jul 2007) | 4 lines
>> >>
>> >> Changed the behaviour of out-of-bounds negative
>> >> subscripts to match that of S. Such values are
>> >> now ignored rather than tripping an error.
>> >>
>> >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> >>
>> >> So, it was changed on purpose, by one of the true "R"s, very
>> >> much on purpose.
>> >>
>> >> Making it a *warning* instead of the original error
>> >> may have been both more cautious and more helpful for
>> >> detecting programming errors.
>> >>
>> >> OTOH, John Chambers, the father of S and hence grandfather of R,
>> >> may have had good reasons why it seemed more logical to silently
>> >> ignore such out of bound negative indices:
>> >> One could argue that
>> >>
>> >> x[-5] means "leave away the 5-th element of x"
>> >>
>> >> and if there is no 5-th element of x, leaving it away should be a no-op.
>> >>
>> >> After all this musing and history detection, my gut decision
>> >> would be to only change the documentation which Ross forgot to change.
>> >>
>> >> But of course, it may be interesting to hear other programmeR's feedback on this.
>> >>
>> >> Martin
>>
>
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--
Hervé Pagès
Program in Computational Biology
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