Hi Hadley, my point actually came from a data analyst point of view. A character variable is something used for extra information, eg the "any other ideas?" field of a questionnaire. A categorical variable is a variable describing categories defined by the researcher. If it is made clear that a factor is the object type needed for a categorical variable, there is no confusion. All my students get it. But I agree that in many cases people are taught that a factor is somehow related to character variables. And that does not make sense from a data analyst point of view if you think about variables as continuous, ordinal and nominal in a model context.
So I don't think adding more confusing behaviour and pitfalls is a solution to something that's essentially a misunderstanding. It's something that's only solved by explaining it correctly imho. Cheers Joris On Thu, Aug 9, 2018 at 2:36 PM Hadley Wickham <h.wick...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I 100% agree with you, and is this the behaviour that vctrs used to > have and dplyr currently has (at least in bind_rows()). But > pragmatically, my experience with dplyr is that people find this > behaviour confusing and unhelpful. And when I played the full > expression of this behaviour in vctrs, I found that it forced me to > think about the levels of factors more than I'd otherwise like to: it > made me think like a programmer, not like a data analyst. So in an > ideal world, yes, I think factors would have stricter behaviour, but > my sense is that imposing this strictness now will be onerous to most > analysts. > > Hadley > > -- > http://hadley.nz > -- Joris Meys Statistical consultant Department of Data Analysis and Mathematical Modelling Ghent University Coupure Links 653, B-9000 Gent (Belgium) <https://maps.google.com/?q=Coupure+links+653,%C2%A0B-9000+Gent,%C2%A0Belgium&entry=gmail&source=g> ----------- Biowiskundedagen 2017-2018 http://www.biowiskundedagen.ugent.be/ ------------------------------- Disclaimer : http://helpdesk.ugent.be/e-maildisclaimer.php [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
