Folks, In brief -- how many of you have found the 'operators' package to be valuable in their work? Not that I lack respect for the amount of work involved in creating and maintaining a package, but I am unsure about the utility of these new operators. Several of the operators appear to offer different ways of accomplishing tasks that are already relatively easy in base R -- regular expressions, set membership, etc. Some tasks appear slightly clearer with these operators, e.g. foo <- letters %without% 'a' is clearer than foo <- letters[letters != 'a'], but widespread use of the package would require future developers as well as our our cooperators to be conversant in with the new operators as well as the common base R idioms. There is the additional risk of programs using these operators requiring additional attention if the package is not maintained. Thank you in advance for any insights, cur -- Curt Seeliger, Data Ranger Raytheon Information Services - Contractor to ORD seeliger.curt@epa.gov 541/754-4638 [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
How is this different to dependency on regular functions ? On 07/02/2009 10:29 PM, Seeliger.Curt at epamail.epa.gov wrote:> Folks, > > In brief -- how many of you have found the 'operators' package to be > valuable in their work? > > Not that I lack respect for the amount of work involved in creating and > maintaining a package, but I am unsure about the utility of these new > operators. Several of the operators appear to offer different ways of > accomplishing tasks that are already relatively easy in base R -- regular > expressions, set membership, etc. Some tasks appear slightly clearer with > these operators, e.g. foo<- letters %without% 'a' is clearer than foo<- > letters[letters != 'a'], but widespread use of the package would require > future developers as well as our our cooperators to be conversant in with > the new operators as well as the common base R idioms. > > There is the additional risk of programs using these operators requiring > additional attention if the package is not maintained. > > Thank you in advance for any insights, > > cur-- Romain Francois Independent R Consultant +33(0) 6 28 91 30 30 http://romainfrancois.blog.free.fr |- http://tr.im/qzSl : using ImageJ from R: the RImageJ package |- http://tr.im/qzSJ : with semantics for java objects in rJava `- http://tr.im/qzTs : Better completion popups