There is no inconsistency. Documentation of `names` says "...value should be a character vector of up to the same length as x..." In the first definition your character vector is not the same length as length of x, so you enforce NA by not defining value[2]
x <- 1:2 value<-c("a") value[2] [1] NA where as in the second case, R uses default value "", from `names` documentation "..The name "" is special: it is used to indicate that there is no name associated with an element.". Since you defined the first one, it internally assigns "" to non-defined names to match the length of the vector. ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel