Archive for September 21st, 2008
Design Flaws in R #3 — Zero Subscripts
Unlike the two design flaws I posted about before (here, here, and also here), where one could at least see a reason for the design decision, even if it was unwise, this design flaw is just incomprehensible. For no reason at all that I can see, R allows one to use zero as a subscript without triggering an error. (Remember that in R, indexes for vectors and matrices start at one, not zero.)
This is of course a terrible decision, because it makes debugging harder, and makes it more likely that bugs will exist that have never been noticed. (more…)
12 comments September 21, 2008