R devel - Mar 2023 - confusing all.equal output

dear r-devel,

This has probably been forever like this but is this satisfying ?

all.equal(c(1,NA,NA), c(1,NA,3))
#> [1] "'is.NA' value mismatch: 1 in current 2 in target"

is.NA() doesn't exist (is.na() does), and is.na() is never 1 or 2.

In this example it's obvious that we're counting missing values, in a
general situation I believe it isn't (we might understand it as the
position of the first NA for instance).

I would expect something like "'amount of missing values mismatch: 1 in
current 2 in target"

Thanks,

Antoine

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

Yes... Also, of course, the sentence after colon does not the describe the cause
of the mismatch, e.g.
> all.equal(c(1,NA,NA), c(NA,NA,3))
[1] "'is.NA' value mismatch: 2 in current 2 in target"

could be confusing. 

Perhaps "is.na() mismatch (2 positions)", with the count calculated as
sum(is.na(current) != is.na(target)) instead?

Or you could give both off-diagonal elements of the confusion matrix:

"target-only: 1, current-only: 1"

but actually, the whole current/target terminology is somewhat unclear.

-pd
> On 1 Mar 2023, at 13:53 , Antoine Fabri <antoine.fabri at gmail.com>
wrote:
> 
> dear r-devel,
> 
> This has probably been forever like this but is this satisfying ?
> 
> all.equal(c(1,NA,NA), c(1,NA,3))
> #> [1] "'is.NA' value mismatch: 1 in current 2 in
target"
> 
> is.NA() doesn't exist (is.na() does), and is.na() is never 1 or 2.
> 
> In this example it's obvious that we're counting missing values, in
a
> general situation I believe it isn't (we might understand it as the
> position of the first NA for instance).
> 
> I would expect something like "'amount of missing values mismatch:
1 in
> current 2 in target"
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Antoine
> 
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> 
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