> -----Original Message----- > From: h.wick...@gmail.com [mailto:h.wick...@gmail.com] On > Behalf Of Hadley Wickham > Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2011 9:21 AM > To: William Dunlap > Cc: Tim Hesterberg; Henrik Bengtsson; r-devel@r-project.org > Subject: Re: [Rd] matrixStats: Extend to arrays too (Was: Re: > Suggestion: Adding quick rowMin and rowMax functions to base package) > > >> You mean rowMaxes, right? Or is the rule to add an s, not to > >> pluralise? > > > > In S+ we chose to just append the 's' instead of making > > everyone worry about the vagarities of English spelling > > and pluralization rules. We also have 'groupAnys' and > > 'igroupAnys' (and should have {row,col}Anys, but we don't). > > I think that's the strongest argument for sticking with singular nouns > for function names - English pluralisations are complex and arbitrary, > but just adding an s is going to look horrible for any native speaker. > > Hadley
That is a good argument, but the horse has been out of the barn for quite a while: rowSums has been in R since at least 2007 (2.6.1 is the oldest version of R I have installed) and in S+ since at least 1998 (S+ 5.0, the oldest I have installed). There are lots of R and S+ functions with plurals in the name (computeRestarts, objects, sys.calls, ...) and I think they generally make sense to be plural. (However, why is dim() singular and dimnames() plural? Their results generally have the same length for a given object.) Bill Dunlap Spotfire, TIBCO Software wdunlap tibco.com > > > -- > Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair > Department of Statistics / Rice University > http://had.co.nz/ > ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel