[R] SAS-like method of recoding variables?

Dieter Menne dieter.menne at menne-biomed.de
Tue Jun 23 09:38:52 CEST 2009




Simon Blomberg-4 wrote:
> 
> I'm not sure we should measure superiority by how well a statement parses
> into English. If this were true, we would all be programming in COBOL.
> 
> P.Dalgaard wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> IF TYPE='TRUCK' and count=12 THEN VEHICLES=TRUCK+((CAR+BIKE)/2.2);
>> 
>> vehicles <- ifelse(TYPE=='TRUCK' & count=12, TRUCK+((CAR+BIKE)/2.2), NA)
>> 
>> 
> 
> Read both versions to an audience, and you will have to admit that this is
> one of the cases where SAS is superior.
> 

COBOL? Touché. Looking a bit beyond programming languages, there is quite an
agreement that the right choice is somewhere between verbosity and cryptis
(?English). 

APL, classical Perl, first generation C and FORTH are in the cryptic
category, the latter because only Germans have the mental language stack to
handle it, so we are in unfair advantage (free quote of Peter Dalgaard's
comment a few years ago) 

COBOL certainly is on the other side. But checking the logic of code by
reading it without visual feedback has its merits in quality control.

Dieter

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