Timeline for If R were reprogrammed from scratch today, what changes would be most useful to the statistics community?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
9 events
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| Jan 11, 2021 at 22:06 | comment | added | J. Mini |
This issue extends beyond just parameters to functions. It also applies to the functions themselves. Why do we have readline and readLines and colMeans and weighted.mean? These aren't special library functions, these examples of a lack of any consistent naming scheme are all in base R.
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| Jan 11, 2021 at 21:28 | comment | added | Firebug |
@KarolisKoncevičius write.table does not have dimnames
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| Jan 11, 2021 at 21:21 | comment | added | Karolis Koncevičius |
@Firebug - We can use dimnames() all the time with matrices, arrays, and even data frames. So as far as I see - all do have it. But for me rownames() and colnames() are too convenient to give up.
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| Jan 11, 2021 at 21:09 | comment | added | Firebug | @KarolisKoncevičius Only dimnames is necessary, all should have it. In it's absence, alias into other arguments. | |
| Jan 11, 2021 at 19:24 | comment | added | Karolis Koncevičius |
dimnames in a matrix come from array(), which is more general and can have more than two dimensions, hence a need for more name vectors. rownames and colnames are just shortcuts for a matrix. And row.names is generic and used in all other situations. So at least some of those inconsistencies cannot be resolved: if we add rownames and colnames to a matrix() it becomes inconsistent with array().
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| Jan 11, 2021 at 18:34 | comment | added | Scortchi♦ |
(+1) I still type loadRDS or writeRDS often enough to be slightly annoyed by the inconsistency in function names.
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| Jan 11, 2021 at 17:28 | comment | added | Sextus Empiricus | +1 I have gotten used to type the first letters and pause a short moment to give Rstudio the time to hint me the correct name. | |
| Jan 11, 2021 at 16:44 | comment | added | Firebug | Arguably, this is one of the few changes that could be done today :) | |
| Jan 11, 2021 at 8:49 | history | answered | Stephan Kolassa | CC BY-SA 4.0 |