[R] order() 'decreasing =' argument must be typed in full

Berwin A Turlach berwin at maths.uwa.edu.au
Fri Jul 28 12:12:55 CEST 2006


G'day John,

>>>>> "JT" == Thaden, John J <ThadenJohnJ at uams.edu> writes:

    JT> Isn't is standard practice to have R base functions accept
    JT> truncated argument names as long as they are unambiguous?
No. :)

The help page of order states:

Usage:

     order(..., na.last = TRUE, decreasing = FALSE)

Standard practice in R is that arguments behind ... are only matched
by "exact matching", i.e., you have to specify the tag of that
argument in full.  Details on how arguments are matched are in the
section "Argument matching" of "The R Language Definition" (and all
though this is a draft, that part seems to be authoritative :) ).

Cheers,

        Berwin

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