"Gabor Grothendieck" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > For it to be well defined, there would need to be a names > method and a names<- method for the factor class or else > the default methods would have to be able to handle factors.
Not only that but other methods for factors need to know about the names and be able to modify them accordingly, e.g. > getS3method("levels<-","factor") function (x, value) { xlevs <- levels(x) if (is.list(value)) #something ... else { ... nlevs <- xlevs <- as.character(value) } factor(xlevs[x], levels = unique(nlevs)) } Here, xlevs[x] will not have the same names as x (it gets names from xlevs if anything) so you'd have to have extra code for setting the names on the result. (Rather interestingly, the factor() function does explicitly retain names, so there are not quite as many places where they will be lost as I would have expected.) -- 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