[R] Problem with data.frames

Simon Fear Simon.Fear at synequanon.com
Mon Aug 4 17:19:04 CEST 2003


You believed right - I do indeed lack the vision of others to foresee
any
practical need to attach and detach within a recursive function, except
perhaps for my own amusement. Should I do the recursive call in between
the
attach and detach, I wonder? Wouldn't it all be fun, watching that
search
path grow and grow, before the function eventually hit the first detach!
And
just imagine the hilarity you could have, attaching and detaching at
different positions! I could have a thousand identical data sets, all
called
Eric!!!

It's one of the many situations in which I would very much like to get a
warning or error message, pointing out to me that I had absolutely no
idea
what I was doing.

Surely that's what warnings are for? For those of us who wonder why our
code
doesn't do what we think it should, until a long time after the
deadline?

SF

-----Original Message-----
From: Prof Brian Ripley [mailto:ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk]
Sent: 04 August 2003 14:34
To: Simon Fear
Cc: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
Subject: RE: [R] Problem with data.frames


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Think about what happens if you call a function recursively, e.g. by 
Recall(), and that function includes an attach/detach pair.

I believe it is your vision that is too limited, not other people's.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595
 

Simon Fear
Senior Statistician
Syne qua non Ltd
Tel: +44 (0) 1379 644449
Fax: +44 (0) 1379 644445
email: Simon.Fear at synequanon.com
web: http://www.synequanon.com
 
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