The reason is that you asked for more terms than can exist.

You seem unaware that 2.6.2 is obsolete, and that there are changes in R-patched, with the following NEWS item:

    o   poly() has additional checks against user error (as in PR#11243).

and that the help page now says

  degree: the degree of the polynomial.  Must be less than the number
          of unique points.

As the FAQ says, please don't make further reports on items that have already been addressed (as clearly marked in the bug repository).

On Fri, 16 May 2008, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

I don't understand why this is a bug in usage.  Is it because the 2nd
argument is not named?  I get the same behavior if I do name it:

=====
[R version 2.6.2 (2008-02-08), Windows XP Pro]

R> x = rep(1:4,3)
R> y = (1:12)^1.5
R> lm(y ~ poly(x, degree=10))

Call:
lm(formula = y ~ poly(x, degree = 10))

Coefficients:
           (Intercept)   poly(x, degree = 10)1   poly(x, degree = 10)2
              18.39370                14.21385                 0.58588
 poly(x, degree = 10)3   poly(x, degree = 10)4   poly(x, degree = 10)5
              -0.01770                 3.34767               -11.46388
 poly(x, degree = 10)6   poly(x, degree = 10)7   poly(x, degree = 10)8
               0.51178                 0.44296                12.47199
 poly(x, degree = 10)9  poly(x, degree = 10)10
             -28.38972                18.47439
=====

Is there a case where we *would* want a 10th degree polynomial fitted to
only 4 distinct x values?  A simple modification [changing 'length(x)'
to 'length(unique(x))' in 2 places] seems to fix this:
=====
R> mypoly
   ...
    if (raw) {
        if (degree >= length(unique(x)))
            stop("'degree' must be less than number of points")
   ...
    if (is.null(coefs)) {
        if (degree >= length(unique(x)))
            stop("'degree' must be less than number of points")
   ...

R> lm(y ~ mypoly(x, degree=10))
Error in mypoly(x, degree = 10) :
  'degree' must be less than number of points
=====

Russ
--
Russell V. Lenth, Professor
Department of Statistics
  & Actuarial Science            (319)335-0814    FAX (319)335-3017
The University of Iowa           [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Iowa City, IA 52242  USA         http://www.stat.uiowa.edu/~rlenth/

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--
Brian D. Ripley,                  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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