After the discussion a while back about how sort inconsistently handles
attributes such as dim's, I have taken a closer look and found yet more
anomalies.
That suggested trying out the principle that sort() should preserve only
names (and sort those). Now, sort(partial=) was preserving names and NOT
sorting them, and since it was included for efficiency I decided it should
just drop names.
One consequence of this is that sort() would drop S3 classes (which is
necessary for e.g. time-series-like classes).
I have tested this out over CRAN packages and it is currently live in
R-devel. The only thing I can see it breaks is lattice (sorry Deepayan,
please take a look at the changes made to axis.Date whose code you
borrowed).
Given that this is close to what S does and sort() was not documented to
preserve attributes, I was not expecting much impact from this change.
Since it seems to have minimal impact this seems the best way forward, but
I am open to counter-proposals.
--
Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595
