Hernando Cortina
2018-Dec-17 08:35 UTC
[Rd] Unnecessary apostrophe in English base::summary() NA count output?
Hello, this is quite a minor issue but as summary() is in all likelihood one of the most widely used functions in R I decided to email this list. When producing a count of missing values, summary() in English generates an unnecessary and grammatically incorrect apostrophe (NA's rather than NAs) in its table header. For example:> summary(c(1,2,NA,3,4,NA))Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max. NA's 1.00 1.75 2.50 2.50 3.25 4.00 2 The issue can be traced to this file: https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/src/library/base/R/summary.R Unless this is being done intentionally for some reason, the solution would seem to be to replace the string "NA's" with "NAs". There are 9 occurrences in the file. Thank you very much. [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
Ben Bolker
2018-Dec-17 16:01 UTC
[Rd] Unnecessary apostrophe in English base::summary() NA count output?
There seem to be a variety of opinions about style in this case; do
you omit the apostrophe ("NAs") because it's not a possessive or a
contraction, or do you include the apostrophe ("NA's") to clearly
distinguish the acronym from the plural form?
I personally prefer "NAs" to "NA's" but both are
defensible.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/55970/plurals-of-acronyms-letters-numbers-use-an-apostrophe-or-not
https://brians.wsu.edu/2016/05/16/acronyms-and-apostrophes/ ("many
people object to it")
On Mon, Dec 17, 2018 at 10:20 AM Hernando Cortina <hcortina71 at
gmail.com> wrote:>
> Hello, this is quite a minor issue but as summary() is in all likelihood
> one of the most widely used functions in R I decided to email this list.
> When producing a count of missing values, summary() in English generates an
> unnecessary and grammatically incorrect apostrophe (NA's rather than
NAs)
> in its table header. For example:
>
> > summary(c(1,2,NA,3,4,NA))
> Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max. NA's
> 1.00 1.75 2.50 2.50 3.25 4.00 2
>
> The issue can be traced to this file:
> https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/src/library/base/R/summary.R
> Unless this is being done intentionally for some reason, the solution would
> seem to be to replace the string "NA's" with "NAs".
There are 9
> occurrences in the file.
>
> Thank you very much.
>
> [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>
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