Dear Martin, Thank you for the well-reasoned response. I realized I was rather late to make this suggestion for 4.0.0, changing a somewhat low-level function that can indeed affect packages.
I was just reviewing some R user scripts that were using type.convert(), mainly on data frames. In all cases, people were passing as.is=TRUE, so I was reminded that I would not be the only user who would appreciate if as.is=TRUE becomes the default at some point. So I am happy to hear that the help page now mentions that the as.is=TRUE is planned to be the default at some point in the future. Looking forward to the 4.0.0 official release - all positive changes! All the best, Arni ________________________________ From: Martin Maechler <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, April 20, 2020 6:23:31 PM To: Arni Magnusson Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Rd] stringsAsFactors and type.convert() >>>>> Arni Magnusson >>>>> on Mon, 13 Apr 2020 22:20:19 +0000 writes: > If read.table() is defaulting to "character" instead of "factor" data type, shouldn't type.convert() also default to "character" in R 4.0.0? > This would seem like a good time to change the default to type.convert(as.is=TRUE), to align it with the new default in read.table and data.frame. I think many R >=4.0.0 users would be happy with as.is=TRUE as the default in type.convert. > I'm happy to work on the patch and run tests if that is helpful. > Cheers, > Arni Dear Arni, thank you for the notice, which unfortunately wasn't noticed (Easter break etc) and was too late in any case to fulfill the criterion of a small trivial bug fix for R 4.0.0 beta (very close to becoming RC (= "Release Candidate"). Even when type.convert() may not be used much directly (but rather indirectly via read.table() where there's no problem), we found it too risky to destabilize the R 4.0.0 prereleases. As you all know there were ( / are?) still package changes needed and a few other important "todo"s, so we had to decide to postpone this (even for R-devel) to after releasing R 4.0.0 coming Friday. I've committed a change to the help page which does mention that the default for 'as.is' is planned to be changed. Also, the help page's "Details" section, for a long time has ended with Since this is a helper function, the caller should always pass an appropriate value of 'as.is'. If useRs and package authors have followed this advice, they won't be bitten at all. Best regards, Martin ______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
