John Chambers wrote: > Designing a "better data frame" is something many people have likely > thought about; I certainly have. > > But data frames are so widely used and so central to models and other > software that a major change needs to be done by the user community, or > at least with maximum feedback, IMO. > > Also, my prior feeling would be that it's better to think of an S4 class > to play the role of data.frame, rather than tinkering with the S3 class > to allow S4 columns. Having formal classes (particularly using class > unions to abstract notions about variables in the data frame) lets one > create a more precise and reliable definition. > > It's true, though, that one then has to work out the details of > interfacing the S4 data frame class to current software that works with > the S3 data.frame class. AFAICS that is not too hard, but of course the > details would be important. > > I've played around with some of these ideas, more as educational aids in > discussing classes and methods than as a serious proposal. Last time I > looked, the writeup was not at a level I would feel happy circulating > :-} But perhaps a group of interested people could exchange some ideas.
As far as I see this (at the risk of uterly simplifying the issue) new data.frame (perhaps dataFrame) could just be a list? of classes that have the same length i.e. length() should have the same value. Gregor ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel