Hi,
I was looking at the ave documentation and it seems awfully sparse. How about we
change the description from:
Subsets of x[] are averaged, where each subset consist of those observations
with the same factor levels.
to:
Subsets of x[] are averaged, where each subset consist of those observations
within a combination of factor levels. The result will have the same length as
x[].
Maybe that's not just what I want either. ave is so useful any time you want
to basically split/apply and want the output to be the same lenghth. Here's
an example...
x <- c('a', 'a', 'b', 'b', 'c',
'c', 'a', 'a')
f <- c(1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2)
ave(x, f, FUN = order )
One would never have deduced that from the help alone and it seems like a
primary function. Or, more advanced
as.numeric( ave(x, f, FUN = function(x) factor(x, levels = unique(x))) )
And if this isn't where I'd send help documentation suggestions where
could I?