On 2013-03-09 11:14, R. Michael Weylandt wrote:
On Sat, Mar 9, 2013 at 6:50 PM, David Winsemius <dwinsem...@comcast.net> wrote:
I was unable to find the reason for the original coercion in the help("for") 
page or the R
Language Definition entry regarding for-loops. On the hunch that coercion via 
as.vector
might be occurring,

Behaviorally, it seems to, but the code for do_for in eval.c has
factors special-cased to call
asCharacterFactor so that might not be a robust detail to rely on. The
relevant behavior seems instead to be that there's a
switch on val_type which creates the loop index but doesn't copy all
attributes (like class)

Note that this means a user's as.vector wouldn't be called here:

as.vector.flub <- function(x, ...) letters[x]

foo <- 1:5
class(foo) <- "flub"

as.vector(foo)

for(j in foo) {print(j); print(class(j))}

as.vector.grub <- function(x, ...) match(x, letters)

bar <- letters[1:5]
class(bar) <- "grub"

as.vector(bar)

for(j in bar) {print(j); print(class(j))}

Cheers,
Michael

I think that Michael is right - the problem is with val_type
in the do_for code.

Here's a simplified version of Alexandre's example:

 d <- as.Date("2013-03-10")
 for(i in seq_along(d)) print(i)
 #[1] 1

 for(i in d) print(i)
 #[1] 15774
where we might have expected to see "2013-03-10".

The essential line in the do_for code seems to me to be:

 val_type = TYPEOF(val);

?typeof tells us that R does not have a 'date' type, so:

 typeof(d)
 #[1] "double"

And the for-loop results follow.

Peter Ehlers

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