range( <dates>, na.rm = TRUE ) (PR#10508)

(Drats! Jitterbug is playing tricks with the PR# again. Attempting to
refile so that we can kill PR#10509)

Peter Dalgaard wrote:

Kurt.Hornik at wu-wien.ac.at wrote:

------- Start of forwarded message -------
Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2007 21:44:57 +0100
To: Steve Mongin <sjm at ccbr.umn.edu>
Cc: cran at r-project.org
Subject: Re: range( <dates>, na.rm = TRUE )
In-Reply-To: <200711062044.OAA14064 at minnow.ccbr.umn.edu>
Reply-To: Kurt.Hornik at wu-wien.ac.at
From: Kurt Hornik <Kurt.Hornik at wu-wien.ac.at>
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Steve Mongin writes:

Dear CRAN:
I am running 'R' on Linux as follows:

version

               _
  platform       i686-redhat-linux-gnu
  arch           i686
  os             linux-gnu
  system         i686, linux-gnu
  status
  major          2
  minor          6.0
  year           2007
  month          10
  day            03
  svn rev        43063
  language       R
  version.string R version 2.6.0 (2007-10-03)

I have a question about the behavior of "range()" with missing dates.

With the previous version (2.4?) , the command:

range( as.Date( c( "2007-11-06", NA ) ), na.rm = TRUE )

yielded:

[1] "2007-11-06" "2007-11-06"

Now I get:

[1] NA NA

Is this a bug?

Yes, I see in the "What's New" page:

  "The Math2 and Summary groups (round, signif, all, any, max, min,
   summ, prod, range) are now primitive."

Is the "primitive" characteristic supposed to behave as above with
missing dates?

Thanks for any help that you can provide.

This is really a question for r-devel or r-bugs, I think, but not for
the CRAN maintainers.

I would think it is a bug.  Perhaps simply file a bug report?

Again? ;-)

The bug is here:

range.default

function (..., na.rm = FALSE, finite = FALSE)
{
    x <- c(..., recursive = TRUE)
    if (is.numeric(x)) {
        if (finite)
            x <- x[is.finite(x)]
        else if (na.rm)
            x <- x[!is.na(x)]
    }
    c(min(x), max(x))
}
<environment: namespace:base>

Objects of class Date are not considered numeric, so we end up taking
min and max without removing NA.

One solution could be

if (is.numeric(x) || inherits(x, "Date") ){....}