> Yes, as Brian said. And this makes sense: the names are a property of the > container, not a property of the contents. Using single brackets creates a > new container with a subset of the elements. Using double brackets extracts > an element. > > The fact that there's no way to hold a number other than in a length one > container means that the results are both length one containers, but > conceptually there's a difference between subsetting and extracting. Perhaps > at some distant date in the future scalar numbers will be possible, and then > maybe c(a=1, b=2)[[1]] would give one.
I like to make the distinction between simplifying and preserving subsetting (maybe not the best names but the best I've been able to come up with). It's unfortunate (but understandable) that the syntax is inconsistent between lists and matrices: x[i] / x[[i]], vs x[i, , drop = F], x[i, ] Hadley -- Chief Scientist, RStudio http://had.co.nz/ ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
