A question I'm sure I should be able to answer myself

Thanks. It does indeed fix the problem that I did not know existed.  
May I inquire what is really happening? The help page for utils::  
edit suggests to me that the dataframe is being sent to "vi" ( ==  
"vim" on my installation),  but that certainly does not look like a  
vim window.

On Aug 2, 2009, at 10:36 AM, Simon Urbanek wrote:

David,

this was fixed in the recent GUI as the thread you replied to says.  
Please update your GUI to 5450 or later.

Cheers,
Simon


On Aug 2, 2009, at 10:20 AM, David Winsemius wrote:

I am not a regular user of that facility and cannot see that it  
has much value over the facilities available in the console.  
Nontheless, I can replicate the error, but not the hang behavior  
on a relatively current 64 bit R installation run from the 64 bit  
GUI:

dput(data2)

structure(list(Id02 = structure(c(1L, 2L, 3L, 3L), .Label = c("1.a",
"2.b", "3.d"), class = "factor"), Area = c(10, 2, 3, 5)), .Names =  
c("Id02",
"Area"), row.names = c(NA, -4L), class = "data.frame")

edit(data2)

# choosing the "+" icon in the edit window results in this message  
in the GUI console window
Error in edit.data.frame(data2) :
SET_VECTOR_ELT() can only be applied to a 'list', not a 'character'

sessionInfo()

R version 2.9.1 Patched (2009-07-04 r48897)
x86_64-apple-darwin9.7.0

locale:
en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] splines   stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets   
methods   base

other attached packages:
[1] fortunes_1.3-6  MASS_7.2-46     chron_2.3-30     
Design_2.1-2    survival_2.35-4 Hmisc_3.5-2

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] cluster_1.12.0  grid_2.9.1      lattice_0.17-25 tools_2.9.1

-- 
David Winsemius

On Jul 29, 2009, at 5:53 PM, Tracy Lightcap wrote:

Friends:

Here's what's happening. I load an environment with some of my  
datafiles then invoke edit on one of them for test purposes.

edit (pub09)

Here's the file structure:

str(pub09)

'data.frame':	50 obs. of  15 variables:
$ id        : int  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ...
$ state     : Factor w/ 50 levels "AK","AL","AR",..: 2 1 4 3 5 6  
7 8 9 10 ...
$ drug07    : num  0.537 0.185 0.733 0.666 0.948 0.406 0.375 1  
0.686 0.408 ...
$ percapin06: int  26940 33257 27849 24829 34555 34437 44266  
34123 32021 27988 ...
$ file06    : int  213284 24213 268126 210265 3287378 189415  
407979 25034 1390031 360332 ...
$ gjjudges06: int  144 44 171 115 1922 150 180 24 554 197 ...
$ csi06     : num  39.8 32 49.6 49.4 59.5 ...
$ pop06     : int  4590 677 6166 2809 36250 4766 3496 853 18058  
9342 ...
$ berkson06 : int  9 15 9 12 16 6 15 4 15 0 ...
$ ifin05    : int  3 4 1 3 2 2 4 4 2 1 ...
$ stafin05  : num  0.66 0.93 0.19 0.64 0.42 0.5 0.92 0.9 0.51  
0.29 ...
$ pro05     : num  0.34 0.44 0.7 0.4 0.88 0.41 0.56 0.55 0.92  
0.39 ...
$ work06    : num  1481 550 1568 1828 1710 ...
$ lpop06    : num  3.66 2.83 3.79 3.45 4.56 ...
$ newpro05  : num  34 44 70 40 88 41 56 55 92 39 ...

I can add/delete rows using the icons with no problems in the  
editor. Attempting to add columns with the icons, however,  
results in this error message:

Error in edit.data.frame(pub09)  :
SET_VECTOR_ELT() can only be applied to a 'list', not a 'character'

Then R shows the beach ball and never resolves the difficulty.  
And it shows further strangeness: if the edit window is over the  
console, all text in the console below is erased. I end up having  
to force quit every time.

This is only a bother; the datafile isn't affected nor the  
environment. Besides, I usually work on my data in a spreadsheet,  
then import. Still, if the editor is to be used for classes, I  
need to find out why this is happening. I'm guessing it is due to  
character strings in the datafile, but I can't be sure of that  
given the circumstances.

Model: MacBookPro2,2, BootROM MBP22.00A5.B07, 2 processors, Intel  
Core 2 Duo, 2.33 GHz, 2 GB
R:  R 2.9.1 GUI 1.28 Tiger build 32-bit (5444)

Hope I've given enough data to make the problem clear.

Tracy Lightcap
Professor and Chair
Department of Political Science
LaGrange College
601 Broad St.
LaGrange  GA  30240-2999
(O) tlightcap at lagrange.edu (H) altlamp at mindspring.com
706.880.8226
www.lagrange.edu/academics/political-science/faculty/tlightcap.aspx

David Winsemius, MD
Heritage Laboratories
West Hartford, CT

David Winsemius, MD
Heritage Laboratories
West Hartford, CT