similar to: aliases (PR#6614)

Ivo, Let me address your points in reverse order: 1. There is a `wishlist' category for bug reports, which I guess you've overlooked. 2. There is also a `Contributed Documentation' section on the R web site, which you can submit your contribution. As well, there are a few introductory level documents there already that you might be interested. 3. I must repectfully disagree about

Full_Name: ivo welch Version: any OS: linux Submission from: (NULL) (130.132.33.212) hi: in "?stop", in "See Also", please add "quit()" as a mention. Similarly, I would create a help for ?exit, which simply states that "you are probably looking for quit() or stop()". regards, /ivo

I think many people share your view and are aghast at the reception that some well-intentioned posts receive. There have been past discussions on this and many people feel the way you and I do. Just to head off another round, let me acknowledge that there appears to be multiple viewpoints and although hard to believe by myself, there actually is a contingent that views what I see as

dear R wizards: an operation I execute often is the deletion of all observations (in a matrix or data set) that have at least one NA. (I now need this operation for kde2d, because its internal quantile call complains; could this be considered a buglet?) usually, my data sets are small enough for speed not to matter, and there I do not care whether my method is pretty inefficient (ok, I

I ran into an interesting oddity of R, if (0) { print(1); } else { print(2); } is a syntax error, while if (0) { print(1); } else { print(2); } or if (0) { print(1); } else { print(2); } is not. I presume it has to do with the duality of the newline functioning as an end of command (;) character, though it still seems a bit odd, and it took me a while to figure out

Dear R developers: R is supposed to be slow for iterative calculations. actually, it isn't. matrix operations are fast. it is data frame operations that are slow. R <- 1000 C <- 1000 example <- function(m) { cat("rows: "); cat(system.time( for (r in 1:R) m[r,20] <- sqrt(abs(m[r,20])) + rnorm(1) ), "\n") cat("columns: "); cat(system.time(for (c

Full_Name: ivo welch Version: current OS: linux Submission from: (NULL) (130.132.33.212) * In the ?subset page, please add subset( dataframe, select= c(-column1,-column2) ) returns a dara frame that is without columns 1 and 2 . * Also, in ?lm, it would be nice to add a few more words about how to get a residuals vector of the same length as the variable vectors, even if there

Why does stop("we are done") print "Error in eval.with.vis(expr, envir, enclos) :" ? It would seem to me that a plain stop() is not an error, and that it would make more sense to have an error() function that is different from a stop(). Is there a rationale here that I am missing? sincerely, /iaw

Dear R experts--- after many years, I am planning to give in and write my first R package. I want to combine my collection of collected useful utility routines. as my guide, I am planning to use Friedrich Leisch's "Creating R Packages: A Tutorial" from Sep 2009. Is there a newer or better tutorial? this one is 4 years old. I also plan on one change---given that the

Dear R wizards: is there a clean way to assign to elements in a list? what I would like to do, in pseudo R+perl notation is f <- function(a,b) list(a+b,a-b) (c,d) <- f(1,2) and have c be assigned 1+2 and d be assigned 1-2. right now, I use the clunky x <- f(1,2) c <- x[[1]] d <- x[[2]] rm(x) which seems awful. is there a nicer syntax? regards, /iaw ---- Ivo Welch

dear R experts---now I have a case where I want to estimate very large regression models with many fixed effects---not just the mean type, but cross-fixed effects---years, months, locations, firms. Many millions of observations, a few thousand variables (most of these variables are interaction fixed effects). could someone please point me to packages, if any, that would help me estimate such

dear R experts---is there a function that prints a data frame to a string? cat() cannot handle lists, so I cannot write cat("your data frame is:\n", df, "\n"). regards, /iaw ---- Ivo Welch (ivo.welch@gmail.com) [[alternative HTML version deleted]]

dear R experts---I am using the coef() function to pick off the coefficients from an lm() object. alas, I also need the standard errors and I need them fast. I know I can do a "summary()" on the object and pick them off this way, but this computes other stuff I do not need. Or, I can compute (X' X)^(-1) s^2 myself. Has someone written a fast se() function? incidentally, I think

is it possible to throw a stop() that is so hard that it will escape even tryCatch? /iaw ---- Ivo Welch (ivo.welch at gmail.com)

Dear R experts--- Has anyone written parallel versions of "by" (i.e., mcby) and "ave" (i.e. mcave) ? I did ask a question like this a year ago, and then the answer was no. for those who are googling the group for the answer to this question, in the meantime, the poor man's version of "by" is mclapply( split( ds, factor ), FUN ) I don't know the poor

this is not an important question, but I wonder why lm returns an error, and whether this can be shut off. it would seem to me that returning NA's would make more sense in some cases---after all, the problem is clearly that coefficients cannot be computed. I know that I can trap the lm.fit() error---although I have always found this to be quite inconvenient---and this is easy if I have only

dear r experts---Is there a multicore equivalent of by(), just like mclapply() is the multicore equivalent of lapply()? if not, is there a fast way to convert a data.table into a list based on a column that lapply and mclapply can consume? advice appreciated...as always. regards, /iaw ---- Ivo Welch (ivo.welch at gmail.com)

Dear R Wizards---is it possible to get R to show its current call stack (sys.calls()) upon an error abort? I don't use ESS for execution, and it is often not obvious how to locate how I triggered an error in an R internal function. Seeing the call stack would make this easier. (right now, I sprinkle "cat" statements everywhere, just to locate the line where the error appears.) Of

Dear R-experts---is there a relatively low-pain way to get unicode characters into a plot to a pdf device? pdf(file="cardsymbols.pdf") plot( 0, xlim=c(0,5), ylim=c(0,5), type="n") text(1,1, "&spades;") text(2,2, "&hearts;") text(3,3, "&diams;") text(4,4, "&clubs;") dev.off() (these are the characters that I need the most

The treatment of dates seems to be a little inconsistent in R 2.11.1 (2010-05-31): [1] The choice of origins? > as.integer(as.Date("1970-01-01")) works and assumes as origin 1970-01-01. However, > as.Date(1) does not work. It requires an origin (as.Date(1, origin="1970-01-01")). If we set a default origin in the former, it should probably work when the input