Hi all, Came across this curious behavior in:
R version 2.5.0 Patched (2007-06-05 r41831) A simplified example is: > all(c(NA, NA, NA) > NA, na.rm = TRUE) [1] TRUE Is this expected by definition? If one reduces this to individual comparisons, such as : > NA > NA [1] NA > all(NA > NA) [1] NA > all(NA > NA, na.rm = TRUE) [1] TRUE the initial comparison on the 3 element vector would be consistent with the last example. If one evaluates each side of the comparison within the parens in the initial example, you get something along the lines of the following: x <- c(NA, NA, NA) x <- x[!is.na(x)] # remove NA's (eg. mean.default(x, na.rm = TRUE)) > x logical(0) > logical(0) > NA logical(0) > all(logical(0)) [1] TRUE If my train of thought is correct, it seems to me that the behavior above distills down to the comparison between logical(0) and NA, which rather than returning NA, returns logical(0). This would seem appropriate, given that there is no actual comparison being made with NA, I think, since logical(0) is an 'empty' vector. However, should all(logical(0)) return TRUE or logical(0)? For example: > logical(0) == logical(0) logical(0) > all(logical(0) == logical(0)) [1] TRUE If the initial comparison of logical(0) returns logical(0), which is not TRUE: > logical(0) == TRUE logical(0) then why does all() return TRUE, if the individual comparison is not TRUE? By definition from ?all: Given a sequence of logical arguments, a logical value indicating whether or not all of the elements of x are TRUE. The value returned is TRUE if all of the values in x are TRUE, and FALSE if any of the values in x are FALSE. If na.rm = FALSE and x consists of a mix of TRUE and NA values, the value is NA. Does this make any sense? Thanks, Marc Schwartz ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
