Dear All, Martin Maechler has asked me to send this to R-devel for discussion after I submitted it as an enhancement request ( https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=17563).
At this time, the update.formula() method always performs a number of transformations on the results, eliminating redundant variables and reordering interactions to be after the main effects. This is not always the desired behaviour, because formulas are increasingly used for purposes other than specifying linear models. This the proposal is to add an option simplify= (defaulting to TRUE, for backwards compatibility) that if FALSE will skip the simplification step. That is, > update(a~b:c+b, .~.+b) # default: simplify=TRUE a ~ b + b:c > update(a~b:c+b, .~.+b, simplify=FALSE) # results are a mock-up a ~ b:c + b + b >From what I can tell, this can be accomplished by skipping the second line of the implementation of update.formula() ("out <- formula(terms.formula(tmp, simplify = TRUE))"). Any thoughts? One particular question that Martin raised is whether the UI should be just a single logical argument, or something else. Best Regards, Pavel -- Pavel Krivitsky Lecturer in Statistics National Institute of Applied Statistics Research Australia (NIASRA) School of Mathematics and Applied Statistics | Building 39C Room 154 University of Wollongong NSW 2522 Australia T +61 2 4221 3713 Web (NIASRA): http://niasra.uow.edu.au/index.html Web (Personal): http://www.krivitsky.net/research ORCID: 0000-0002-9101-3362 NOTICE: This email is intended for the addressee named and may contain confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient, please delete it and notify the sender. Please consider the environment before printing this email. ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel