>>>>> McGehee, Robert <robert.mcge...@geodecapital.com>
>>>>> on Thu, 17 Apr 2014 19:15:47 -0400 writes:
>> This is all application specific and
>> sort of beyond the scope of type.convert(), which now behaves as it
>> has been documented to behave.
> That's only a true statement because the documentation was changed to
reflect the new behavior! The new feature in type.convert certainly does not
behave according to the documentation as of R 3.0.3. Here's a snippit:
> The first type that can accept all the
> non-missing values is chosen (numeric and complex return values
> will represented approximately, of course).
> The key phrase is in parentheses, which reminds the user to expect a
possible loss of precision. That important parenthetical was removed from the
documentation in R 3.1.0 (among other changes).
> Putting aside the fact that this introduces a large amount of unnecessary
work rewriting SQL / data import code, SQL packages, my biggest conceptual
problem is that I can no longer rely on a particular function call returning a
particular class. In my example querying stock prices, about 5% of prices came
back as factors and the remaining 95% as numeric, so we had random errors
popping in throughout the morning.
> Here's a short example showing us how the new behavior can be unreliable.
I pass a character representation of a uniformly distributed random variable to
type.convert. 90% of the time it is converted to "numeric" and 10% it is a
"factor" (in R 3.1.0). In the 10% of cases in which type.convert converts to a
factor the leading non-zero digit is always a 9. So if you were expecting a
numeric value, then 1 in 10 times you may have a bug in your code that didn't
exist before.
>> options(digits=16)
>> cl <- NULL; for (i in 1:10000) cl[i] <-
class(type.convert(format(runif(1))))
>> table(cl)
> cl
> factor numeric
> 990 9010
Yes.
Murray's point is valid, too.
But in my view, with the reasoning we have seen here,
*and* with the well known software design principle of
"least surprise" in mind,
I also do think that the default for type.convert() should be what
it has been for > 10 years now.
Martin
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