possible bug in chron packages

Dear,

According to the documentation, the parameters given in "dates" are
passed to the function "chron". When trying this out, it turns out
that this apparently doesn't happen, eg:

dates("20100101",format="Ymd",out.format="day mon year")

[1] 01/01/10

chron("20100101",format="Ymd",out.format="day mon year")

[1] 01 Jan 2010

It does actually. If you read the code and/or debug `dates` to see what
is happening, `out.format` is passed on to `chron` which does its thing
and passes back the correctly formatted object as specified by
`out.format`.

However, `dates` then goes on to unclass the returned object and then
stick back on a class. It also tries to preserve the "format" in the
first line of `dates`

fmt <- attr(x, "format")

but in your example this is NULL as `x` is just a character. The code
reapplies this stored format later on with

attr(out, "format") <- fmt

as the last line before returning out.

The "format" attribute of the object returned by `chron` never gets
stored or used on the object returned form `dates`.

G

I would expect the outcome of both functions to be the same, or am I
overlooking something?

Kind regards
Joris

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