John, I had raised the matter ten years ago, and I was told that the topic was already very^3 old
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2006-September/042684.html there is some discussion on its origin and also a declaration of intents to change the default behaviour, which, unfortunately, remained a declaration. I agree that R could do better here, let's hope in less than ten years though. ;-) Kind regards, Simone On Fri, Aug 19, 2016 at 5:04 PM, John Mount <jmo...@win-vector.com> wrote: > I was wondering if it would make sense to change the default behavior of > the following: > > summary(15555L) > ## Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max. > ## 15560 15560 15560 15560 15560 15560 > > summary.default on numeric values rounds values (not just presentation) to > getOption("digits")-3L (or four) digits by default, making those values > surprising and less suitable for further calculation. Summary on matrix > and data.frame do not do so. > > It seems it would be nice to have x=15555L; summary(x)[['Min.']] == min(x) > evaluate to TRUE. I know one can alter behavior by changing the global > “digits” option, but I don’t know what other impacts that might have. > Ideally I would think summary.default would not round its values at all, > but use digits to control presentation (by overriding print and such). > Even in presentation the rounding without switching to scientific notation > (such as 1.556e+4) is a bit surprising (I understand rounding and > scientific notation are two different presentation issues, but new users > are very confused that something that appears to be an integer has been > rounded). > > Example: > > summary(data.frame(x=15555)) > ## x > ## Min. :15555 > ## 1st Qu.:15555 > ## Median :15555 > ## Mean :15555 > ## 3rd Qu.:15555 > ## Max. :15555 > summary(15555) > ## Min. 1st Qu. Median Mean 3rd Qu. Max. > ## 15560 15560 15560 15560 15560 15560 > > I have a (bit whiny) polemic trying to explain the pain point here > http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2016/08/my-criticism-of-r-numeric-summary/ > <http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2016/08/my-criticism-of-r-numeric-summary/> > (I am not trying to be rude, more I am trying to emphasize why this can be > confusing to new users). > > > > --------------- > John Mount > http://www.win-vector.com/ <http://www.win-vector.com/> > Our book: Practical Data Science with R http://www.manning.com/zumel/ < > http://www.manning.com/zumel/> > > > > > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel -- ___________________________________________________ Simone Giannerini Dipartimento di Scienze Statistiche "Paolo Fortunati" Universita' di Bologna Via delle belle arti 41 - 40126 Bologna, ITALY Tel: +39 051 2098262 Fax: +39 051 232153 http://www2.stat.unibo.it/giannerini/ ___________________________________________________ [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
