On Mon, 6 Dec 2010, William Dunlap wrote:
I was writing some assertion tests for modelling-related
code I had written and was surprised to see one test
fail because the specials attribute of the output of
terms() is a pairlist instead of a list. In 2.12.0
I get:
dput(attr(terms(y~Spec(x1)+x2, specials=c(Spec)), specials))
list(Spec = 2L)
all.equal(attr(terms(y~Spec(x1)+x2, specials=c(Spec)),
specials), list(Spec=2L))
[1] Modes: pairlist, list
all.equal(attr(terms(y~Spec(x1)+x2, specials=c(Spec)),
specials), pairlist(Spec=2L))
[1] TRUE
identical(attr(terms(y~Spec(x1)+x2, specials=c(Spec)),
specials), pairlist(Spec=2L))
[1] TRUE
I was wondering if there was a reason for using pairlist
instead of list here or it it was just an historical
artifact. In general, when should one use pairlists?
Probably never directly. But indirectly, a lot as for example
argument lists are pairlists.
Looking at the code, I think this one is simply history. For
completeness I will correct ?terms.object.
--
Brian D. Ripley, rip...@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UKFax: +44 1865 272595
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