R help - Nov 2025 - Did behavior of "paired" argument in t.test() change?

? Tue, 4 Nov 2025 11:22:57 -0600
Robert Baer via R-help <r-help at r-project.org> ?????:
> Errorin t.test.formula(value ~ time, data = data_long, paired > TRUE) :
> cannot use 'paired' in formula method
This was changed in R-4.4.0:
https://bugs.r-project.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14359

The news item (see news(grepl('paired', Text))) recommends the use of
Pair(x1, x2) ~ 1 instead of the 'paired' argument. A further fix is
currently in R-devel (but not R-patched): without it, Pair(x1, x2) does
not handle the 'subset' argument.

-- 
Best regards,
Ivan

Yes. Of course, Pair() requires the data to be in wide format. It's been a
while (although not so long ago as some of the other things I cannot
remember...) but I think the reason was that the  ...y~g, paired=TRUE... format
was considered too brittle with respect to sort order and subsetting.

-pd

> On 4 Nov 2025, at 18.40, Ivan Krylov via R-help <r-help at
r-project.org> wrote:
> 
> ? Tue, 4 Nov 2025 11:22:57 -0600
> Robert Baer via R-help <r-help at r-project.org> ?????:
> 
>> Errorin t.test.formula(value ~ time, data = data_long, paired >>
TRUE) :
>> cannot use 'paired' in formula method
> 
> This was changed in R-4.4.0:
> https://bugs.r-project.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14359
> 
> The news item (see news(grepl('paired', Text))) recommends the use
of
> Pair(x1, x2) ~ 1 instead of the 'paired' argument. A further fix is
> currently in R-devel (but not R-patched): without it, Pair(x1, x2) does
> not handle the 'subset' argument.
> 
> -- 
> Best regards,
> Ivan
> 
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-- 
Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
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