Damon Wischik <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I still want to know how I should understand the following: > > > x <- factor(c("one","three")) > > names(x) <- c("fred","jim") > > names(x) > [1] "fred" "jim" > class(x) > [1] "factor" > > Given that names seems to work on factors, I can see two possibilities: > 1. It is a bug that it acts as it does; > 2. the default method does what it says in the help page, but also does > more than just this.
The behaviour is *undefined*, for crying out loud! That means that if you try to do it anyway, you may get an error, something semi-sensible, or find that the code transfers a large sum of money to a Danish bank account... In the present implementation, the names attribute gets attached to the factor just as to an integer vector, but it is not shown when printing and there are several parts of the code where no attempt is made to preserve names since there are not expected to be any. -- O__ ---- Peter Dalgaard Blegdamsvej 3 c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics 2200 Cph. N (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen Denmark Ph: (+45) 35327918 ~~~~~~~~~~ - ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) FAX: (+45) 35327907 ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help