R help - Jul 2006 - order() 'decreasing =' argument must be typed in full

## While in R v. 2.3.1 (the mid-July patch for Windows)
## on a Windows XP machine, this call to order() works fine...

order(1:10,decreasing = TRUE)
## [1] 10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

## ...however, the argument name 'decreasing'
## must be typed in toto (note the missing 'g'
## in the following):
> order(1:10,decreasin = TRUE)
## Error in order(na.last, decreasing, ...) : 
##         argument lengths differ

## Isn't is standard practice to have R base functions
## accept truncated argument names as long as they are
## unambiguous?
 
Thanks,

John Thaden, Ph.D.

Confidentiality Notice: This e-mail message, including any a...{{dropped}}

G'day John,
>>>>> "JT" == Thaden, John J <ThadenJohnJ at
uams.edu> writes:
    JT> Isn't is standard practice to have R base functions accept
    JT> truncated argument names as long as they are unambiguous?
No. :)

The help page of order states:

Usage:

     order(..., na.last = TRUE, decreasing = FALSE)

Standard practice in R is that arguments behind ... are only matched
by "exact matching", i.e., you have to specify the tag of that
argument in full.  Details on how arguments are matched are in the
section "Argument matching" of "The R Language Definition"
(and all
though this is a draft, that part seems to be authoritative :) ).

Cheers,

        Berwin

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