[R-pkg-devel] tibbles are not data frames
Hej Stefan,
On 2017-09-26 10:57, Stefan McKinnon H?j-Edwards wrote:
Hi G?ran, Could you please elaborate on which kind of subsetting that Hadley dislikes? I am yet to encounter operations on data frames that are not possible on tribbles.
For instance, if 'dat' is a data frame, dat[1:3, 5] returns a vector of length 3. If 'dat' is a tibble, you do dat[[5]][1:3] to get the same vector. A tibble never 'drops dimensions'. See Hadley's book, on the web. G?ran
Kindly,
Stefan McKinnon Hoj-Edwards
Stefan McKinnon H?j-Edwards
ph.d. Genetics
+44 (0)776 231 2464
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Skype: stefan_edwards
2017-09-26 8:30 GMT+01:00 G?ran Brostr?m <goran.brostrom at umu.se
<mailto:goran.brostrom at umu.se>>:
I am beginning to get complaints from users of my CRAN packages
(especially 'eha') to the effect that they get error messages like
"Error: Unsupported use of matrix or array for column indexing".
It turns out that they are sticking in tibbles into functions that
expect data frames as input. And I am using the kind of subsetting
that Hadley dislikes (eha is an old package, much older than
tibbles). It is of course a simple matter to change the code so it
handles both data frames and tibbles correctly, but this affects
many functions, and it will take some time. And when the next guy
introduces 'troubles' as an improvement of 'tibbles', I will have to
rewrite the code again.
While I like Hadley's way of doing it, I think it is a mistake to
let a tibble also be of class data frame. To me it is a matter of
inheritance and backwards compability: A tibble should add nice
things to a data frame, not change basic behaviour, in order to call
itself a data frame.
Is it correct to let a tibble be of class "data.frame"?
G?ran Brostr?m
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