yes, this was what I was asking for. I had the notion that one could tag almost anything with a name, and did not appreciate the scope for confusion. thank you for the explanation. regards, /ivo
On 4/22/07, Duncan Murdoch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 4/22/2007 5:46 PM, ivo welch wrote: > > dear R wizards --- would it make sense for names(d$columnname) to be > > "columnname"? I can preserve the columnname through x=subset(dataset, > > select="columnname"), of course, but it would seem that x=d$columnname > > could also do this. No? Sincerely, /iaw > > If I understand what you're asking, I don't think so. > > d$columnname > > extracts an element of the list d. It's typically some sort of vector, > and vectors don't know what their own name is. > > names(d$columnname) > > looks for a names attribute on that vector. If it doesn't have one, > you'll get NULL. > > There are plenty of functions in R which depend on the form of the > argument passed to them, not just its value, but we shouldn't add more > without a very good reason. The change you ask for would mess up the > following calculation: > > > x <- 1:26 > > names(x) <- letters > > d <- list(columnname=x) > > names(d$columnname) > [1] "a" "b" "c" "d" "e" "f" "g" "h" "i" "j" "k" "l" "m" "n" "o" "p" > "q" "r" > [19] "s" "t" "u" "v" "w" "x" "y" "z" > > > Duncan Murdoch > ______________________________________________ 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 and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.