[R] R annoyances

Thomas Lumley tlumley at u.washington.edu
Thu May 19 18:39:13 CEST 2005


On Thu, 19 May 2005, Rod Montgomery wrote:
> Thomas Lumley wrote:
>> This one is actually a FAQ,
>>         mtx[,1,drop=FALSE]
>> 
>>     -thomas
>> 
> I wonder whether there is, or should be, a way to set FALSE as the default?
>

There shouldn't be (apart from editing the code), because you really don't 
want something this basic to be unpredictable.

There have been discussions at several times about whether drop=FALSE or 
drop=TRUE should be the default. The decision has always been that 
programmers can cope either way, but that users probably don't expect 
mtx[,1] to be a vector, and that they definitely don't expect mtx[1,1] to be a 
matrix.

 	-thomas




More information about the R-help mailing list