On Sat, Apr 19, 2014 at 1:06 PM, Simon Urbanek <simon.urba...@r-project.org> wrote: > On Apr 19, 2014, at 9:00 AM, Martin Maechler <maech...@stat.math.ethz.ch> > wrote: > > I think there should be two separate discussions: > > a) have an option (argument to type.convert and possibly read.table) to > enable/disable this behavior. I'm strongly in favor of this. > > b) decide what the default for a) will be. I have no strong opinion, I can > see arguments in both directions > > But most importantly I think a) is better than the status quo - even if the > discussion about b) drags out. > > Cheers, > Simon
Another possibility is: (c) Return the column as factor/character but with a distinguishing class so that the user can reset its class later. e.g. DF <- read.table(...) DF[] <- lapply(DF, function(x) if (inherits(x, "special.class")) as.numeric(x) else x) Personally I would go with (a) in both type.convert and read.table with a default that reflects the historical behavior rather than the current 3.1 behavior. -- Statistics & Software Consulting GKX Group, GKX Associates Inc. tel: 1-877-GKX-GROUP email: ggrothendieck at gmail.com ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
