Message-ID: <x2zoi85pta.fsf@blueberry.kubism.ku.dk>
Date: 2000-12-07T13:22:25Z
From: Peter Dalgaard
Subject: write.table
In-Reply-To: Prof Brian Ripley's message of "Wed, 6 Dec 2000 10:13:31 +0000 (GMT)"
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
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