>>>>> "SM" == Stavros Macrakis <macra...@alum.mit.edu>
>>>>> on Thu, 21 Jan 2010 20:19:28 -0500 writes:
SM> I noticed that in as.data.frame.table, the stringsAsFactors argument
SM> defaults to TRUE, whereas in the other as.data.frame methods, it
defaults to
SM> default.stringsAsFactors().
SM> The documentation and implementation agree on this, so this is not a
bug.
SM> However, I was wondering if this disparity was intended or if it might
be
SM> some sort of unintentional oversight. If it is intentional, I wonder
what
SM> the rationale is.
Some of us (including me) have strongly argued on several
occasions that global options() settings should *not* have an effect
on anything "computing" but just on "output"
i.e. printing/graphing of R results.
As it is currently, potentially R scripts and R functions may
only work correctly for one setting of
options( stringsAsFactors = * )
which is against all principles of functional programming.
>From this (my) point of view, we should strive to eventually deprecate
default.stringsAsFactors() which basically returns
getOption("stringsAsFactors"),
or as first/2nd step redefine it as
default.stringsAsFactors <- function() TRUE
Martin Mächler.
SM> Thanks,
SM> -s
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