On 1/1/2007 12:59 PM, Charles C. Berry wrote: > On Mon, 1 Jan 2007, Duncan Murdoch wrote: > >> A few comments thrown in, and some general comments at the bottom. >> >> On 1/1/2007 1:28 AM, Gabor Grothendieck wrote: >>> This is my 2007 New Year wishlist for R features: >>> >>> 1. [deleted thru 12] > >>> 13. Make upper/lower case of simplify/SIMPLIFY consistent on all >>> apply commands and add a simplify= arg to by. >> It would have been good not to introduce the inconsistency years ago, >> but it's too late to change now. >> > > Really? The consistency issue only concerns mapply, I think.
mapply and its wrapper Vectorize, and perhaps some functions in contributed packages. > > How 'bout changing the formals of mapply to > > $FUN > > > $... > > > $MoreArgs > NULL > > $SIMPLIFY > simplify > > $USE.NAMES > [1] TRUE > > $simplify > [1] TRUE > > i.e. add simplify = TRUE and change SIMPLIFY's default to 'simplify' > > Then the default behavior is retained, specifying a value for > either SIMPLIFY or simplify gives the desired behavior and SIMPLIFY takes > precedence over simplify if both are given values. Not pretty, perhaps, > but it does the job. This allows mapply(..., simplify=TRUE), but is that really "the job"? I think the point of consistency is to make code easier to read and write, and I'm not sure making this one parameter partially case-insensitive achieves that. Should the same thing be done to the functions that currently use "simplify", to achieve even more consistency? Yecch. > I suppose this could get one into trouble if one of the ... args is named > 'simplify', but I do not imagine that is a big deal. I think the reasoning behind the choice of SIMPLIFY was probably to avoid a clash with one of the ... args. I'd prefer a more general solution to this problem, like what the Mac GUI does, and giving argument hints as a function call is being typed. (I think ESS may do this too, but I don't use it.) There are lots of inconsistencies in R functions, and I think making the syntax looser in order to accept a consistent superset is not the right approach: instead, the editor should make it easier for a user to discover what is appropriate in any given context. Duncan Murdoch ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel