write.table
Prof Brian Ripley <ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk> writes:
Just to pick a nit: Could we make a habit of distinguishing between "names" and "identifiers"? The latter being the syntactical term in the R language, briefly the names that you don't need to use get() to access. "123" and "Height in cm" are valid names, but not valid identifiers.
The argument is called `check.names', and has description
check.names: if `TRUE' then the names of the variables in the data
frame are checked to ensure that they are valid variable
names. If necessary they are adjusted (by `make.names') so
that they are.
So `make.names' should be renamed as `make.identifiers'. That is
described as
make.names package:base R Documentation
Make Legal R Names Out of Strings
Description:
Make legal R names out of every `names[i]' string. Invalid
characters are translated to `"."'.
More plausibly, you are proposing a new distinction ....
Hmm. The current distinction would seem to be between "names" and "legal R names" or "valid variable names", of which certainly the latter is misleading since you can easily have variables with weird names like "[<-". But you're probably right that we are to some extent stuck with existing terminology, here and elsewhere. I think I would want to push a convention of using "R names" for the syntactical entities, then.
O__ ---- Peter Dalgaard Blegdamsvej 3 c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics 2200 Cph. N (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen Denmark Ph: (+45) 35327918 ~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard@biostat.ku.dk) FAX: (+45) 35327907 -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-devel mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-devel-request@stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._