>>>>> Martin Maechler <maech...@stat.math.ethz.ch>
>>>>> on Thu, 16 Nov 2017 22:00:16 +0100 writes:
> [This is a "re-post" -- for some reason it never appeared
> on R-devel]
>>>>> Etienne Sanchez <etiennesanch...@gmail.com>
>>>>> on Tue, 14 Nov 2017 19:33:07 +0100 writes:
>> In some cases, str() does not print the "names" attribute
>> of the object:
>>
>> u <- structure(c(5, 6), names = c("a", "b"), color =
>> "blue")
>> str(u) # atomic [1:2] 5 6 # - attr(*, "color")= chr
>> "blue"
>>
>> Is it a bug or a design choice?
>> Originally asked here:
>> https://stackoverflow.com/q/47185756/6656269
> It's not a bug in the sense that a long time ago -- when I
> wrote the first version of str(), for S-plus, before R
> existed -- I had decided that when is.vector(.) was false,
> for whatever reason, the atomic vectors should be shown as
> above.
> I don't remember if S-plus used the same somewhat
> surprising definition of is.vector(.) as R does (but I
> think it did): it is only TRUE for a vector that has no
> other attributes than possibly "names".
> I did occasionally find that the historical choice
> probably was not quite the best in hindsight, but never
> got convinced that it should be changed... Once I'll have
> finished the deparse/dput/dump changes in R-devel
> (hopefully within a week), and as R-devel has quite a few
> small changes to R <= 3.4.x anyway, I may consider to
> change utils:::str.default here ... and have a few dozens
> of package maintainers and R users live with the fact the
> str() outputs will have changed in late spring next year
> ...
> Notably if you or other give convincing reasons why it's
> worth to change... but note that it's quite easy to give
> "Pro" reasons, but there are "Cons" and for such cases a
> lot of "Cons" are related to "there must 100's of 1000s of
> R code lines using str(), and so there will be 100s of
> places where the output changes, ( ... but then I'd
> guestimate that the change would be to the better in most
> cases).
I have been daring (again!) and did change str() so it will
typically no longer print the ominous "atomic" in such cases.
This is for "R-devel" with svn rev >= 73780 ..
It will slightly change str() output for such cases, but in the
half a dozen cases I've looked the cases were always for the
better.
Martin
--
Martin Maechler
ETH Zurich and R Core
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