R help - Feb 2004 - suggestion "suggestion" and dataframe operations

hi chaps:

a simple suggestion:  R tells me who the contributors() are, but this 
should also tell me where I should mail suggestions to.  Is it this 
mailing list?  a repository of suggestions?  an individual?

this came up because i wanted to suggest two small enhancements:

the first is for the summary() method for plain data frames.  it would 
seem to me that the number of "NA"s should be printed as an integer,
not
necessarily in scientific notation.  I have also yet to determine when 
summary() likes to give means and when it does not.  (maybe it was an 
older version that sometimes did not give means).  summary does not seem 
to have optional parameters to specify what statistics I would like. 
this could be useful, too.

another small enhancement:  there are four elementary data frame 
operations that bedevil novices, so they really should have named 
function wrappers:

	delrow( dataframe d, index=45);
	insrow( dataframe d, (row)vector v);
	delcol( dataframe d, "name");
	inscol( dataframe d, (col)vector v);

I looked at my R "bible" (venables&ripley), too, but here too it
is not
as clear as it needs to be.  yes, this may be programmable, but it ain't 
as obvious as it should be for beginners.

regards,

/iaw

hi chaps:

* I have some suggestion, the first of which is about suggestions, R 
tells me who the contributors() are, but this should also tell me where 
I should email suggestions to.  Is it this mailing address/list?  a 
repository of suggestions?  an individual?

this came up because i wanted to suggest enhancements:


* the first is for the summary() method for plain data frames.  it would 
seem to me that the number of "NA" observations should be printed as
an
integer, not necessarily in scientific notation.  I have also yet to 
determine when summary() likes to give means and when it does not. 
(maybe it was an older version that sometimes did not give means). 
summary does not seem to have optional parameters to specify what 
statistics I would like. this could be useful, too.


* another small enhancement:  there are four elementary data frame 
operations that bedevil novices, so they really should have named 
function wrappers:

     delrow( dataframe d, index=45);
     insrow( dataframe d, (row)vector v);
     delcol( dataframe d, "name");
     inscol( dataframe d, (col)vector v);

Even a simple alias would do (maybe named row.delete, column.delete).  I 
looked at my R "bible" (venables&ripley), too, but here too it is
not as
clear as it needs to be.  yes, these operations are programmable, but it 
ain't as obvious as it should be for beginners.  these are elementary.


* Finally, a more complex question: I have a historical rate of stock 
return series (yes, I teach finance).  I would like to make a ts plot on 
the left (plot(date,returns,type="h")), and a plot(density(returns))
on
the right.  works nicely with par(mfrow=c(1,2)), but it would be even 
nicer if I could rotate the density plot 90 degrees, so that it is more 
apparent that the density plot is an aggregation of the points at the 
same y coordinates.  (if need be, a histogram could replace the density 
plot.)  Is it possible to rotate an entire subpanel figure.  if there 
was a "horizontal" parameter to ps.options for plot(), it would do the
trick, but this does not work.   So, this may be a suggestion, too.

regards,

/iaw