as.data.frame.character lacks nm= argument

On 13/09/2012 21:48, Bert Gunter wrote:
Bill:

as.data.frame.character() has no nm, argument, so providing one causes
the error as you can see from the code. Presumably, this is what you
meant by bug/inconsistency, right?
This is using an undocumented argument, 'nm'.  I don't believe anything is said about what might happen if you do that except that it will be passed to methods -- they are not obliged to accept it.

If it were intended for this to be a feature, I think the author might have chosen a less opaque name than 'nm'.
It wasn't, but the author (me) might have chosen a _more_ opaque name if he had thought it necessary to keep people from using undocumented arguments. As it happened, I think I just promoted a variable name inside as.data.frame.vector to become an argument.

But it was a long time ago, in a different job, and besides....
Where we go from here is under discussion in R-core.

-- Bert

On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 1:32 PM, William Dunlap <wdunlap at tibco.com> wrote:
Is the following behavior with as.data.frame(nm=...) a bug?  It is an inconsistency:

as.data.frame(LETTERS[1:10], nm="FirstTenLetters")
Error in as.data.frame.vector(x, ..., nm = nm) :
  formal argument "nm" matched by multiple actual arguments

nm= works for integer arguments:

as.data.frame(1:10, nm="OneToTen")
   OneToTen
1         1
2         2
3         3
4         4
5         5
6         6
7         7
8         8
9         9
10       10

Bill Dunlap
Spotfire, TIBCO Software
wdunlap tibco.com

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as.data.frame.character lacks nm= argument

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