R annoyances

(b) When extracting 2 or more columns of a matrix,
   R returns the result as a matrix, BUT when extracting
   just one column, it returns a vector/array, rather than
   a matrix, so I've to keep doing as.matrix, which is annoying.

	sub.mtx <- as.matrix(mtx[,1])

	Of course I could write a suitable function
		cols <- function(mtx,range) as.matrix(mtx[, range])
	but then I lose the syntactic sugar of being able to say "[,1]".