On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 1:56 AM, Terry Therneau <thern...@mayo.edu> wrote: > > with the entirely different rowSums, but it has been around > > for a long time.) > A lot longer than rowSums ... > > Bill Dunlap > > Spotfire, TIBCO Software > --- > This made me smile. The rowsums function was originally an internal > part of the survival package, used for fast computation of certain sums > when there is a cluster() statement. It was Statistical Sciences > (S-Plus) who moved it to global status. That is, they used it in enough > other places that they decided to speed it up, took over the > maintainance and ownership of the function (with my blessing), and > ceased to label it as part of "survival" in the manual. > This "metabug" can't be laid at R's feet.
The same process happened independently in R. I ported the 'survival' version of rowsum() to R, added it to base R in version 0.63.1, and later it made it faster using hashing. So perhaps it isn't entirely StatSci's fault, although it's likely that R would eventually have added a rowsum() function for compatibility. -thomas -- Thomas Lumley Professor of Biostatistics University of Auckland ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
