William Dunlap writes: > I don't like the idea of having a length-1 dim attribute trigger some > behavior of sample. (Should a length-2 dim cause it to sample > rows of a matrix, as unique() and duplicated() do?).
I wasn't too clear. I would want any dim attribute on its first argument to cause sample to treat it as the vector of values to sample from, rather than as the upper limit for the set of integers to sample from. This is consistent with how higher-dimensional arrays can be treated as vectors in some other contexts. But I'd expect the 1D case to be the common case. The basic problem, here and in other places, is that R (and S) don't distinguish a scalar from a vector of length one. I think this was a mistake, which one can try to unwind now by at least not treating a vector of length one as a scalar if it is explicitly marked as a vector by a dim attribute. Allowing a dim attribute of length zero (presently disallowed) might also be a good idea, because it could be used to explicitly mark a single number as a scalar, not a vector of length one. Radford Neal ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
