On 12/22/2006 10:20 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Full_Name: Xiao Gang FAN > Version: 2.4.0 > OS: Windows XP > Submission from: (NULL) (159.50.101.9) > > > Dear All, > > This is not really a bug report, but rather a change wish to the Base R > behaviour > on some functions when applying them to character strings vectors/matrices. > > Actually in R, we can do thinks like, the most naturally way in this the > world: >> "a" < "b" > [1] TRUE > >> order(c("b","a")) > [1] 2 1 > >> pmax(c("a","b"), c("b")) > [1] "b" "b" > > > But helas, we can't do things like: >> max(c("a","b")) > Error in max(..., na.rm = na.rm) : invalid 'type' (character) of argument > >> range(c("z","b","w","c")) > Error in min(..., na.rm = na.rm) : invalid 'type' (character) of argument > >> which.min(c("b","a")) > integer(0) > Warning message: > NAs introduced by coercion > > I hope that you could understand the incoherence exhibited here > and my wish to see that to be changed some day, say in the becoming > year 2007. Here's a first list of functions to be reviewed: > min(), max(), which.min(), which.max(), range(), ...
That does seem like a reasonable change. Why not submit a patch? min and max are in https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/src/main/summary.c. I haven't looked up the others, but it's possible they just call the internal code for min and max. Duncan Murdoch ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel