Posts filed under ‘R Programming’
Design Flaws in R #2 — Dropped Dimensions
In a comment on my first post on design flaws in the R language, Longhai remarked that he has encountered problems as a result of R’s default behaviour of dropping a dimension of a matrix when you select only one row/column from that dimension. This was indeed the design flaw that I was going to get to next! I think it also points to what is perhaps a deeper design flaw. (more…)
Design Flaws in R #1 — Reversing Sequences
The R language for statistical computing has become the standard for academic statistical research, for the very good reason that it’s better than the alternatives. It’s far from perfect however. I could come up with a long “wish list” of desired features it lacks, but that’s not what I’ll do in this series of posts. Instead, I’ll concentrate on real design flaws — aspects of the language that make it all too easy to write unreliable programs. Many of these are inherited from R’s predecessors, S and S-Plus, and may even originate in the very earliest version of S, which was seen more as a calculator than as a programming language.
By far the most commonly-encountered design flaw in R is in the “:” operator for producing sequences, whose most common use is in “for” statements. Here’s an example: (more…)
