On 13-07-11 12:59 PM, Hadley Wickham wrote:
It needs to have ... in the formal argument list because the generic
subset() does.

It could enforce a run-time warning that some arguments were being skipped
(by testing length(list(...)) for example), but then NextMethod might fail,
in a case where an object has a complicated class vector.

That wouldn't be a problem if the check was implemented in
subset.data.frame, would it?

Suppose the class vector is c("myclass", "data.frame"). Then subset.myclass would be called first if it existed. It might do some simple computation and then use NextMethod. It should not need to know that it is calling subset.data.frame next, so it will pass all of its arguments along, possibly including some that subset.data.frame should ignore.

Duncan Murdoch

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