On Mon, 13 Jun 2005, BXC (Bendix Carstensen) wrote: > The key to solving your problem is that read.spss per default > gives you a *list* and not a *dataframe* (can anyone explain this > choice of default?). >
The reason for the default is speed. It's possible that the default could be changed to make it easier to use for people who don't read the help page. I haven't measured the speed difference recently, but it used to be significant. IIRC the reasoning was that you would often want just a few variables from a data file, in which case subsetting before creating a data frame was a worthwhile saving. I have certainly had complaints that reading just a few variables from a large Stata file is slow (because it does produce a data frame first) -thomas ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html