"Gabor Grothendieck" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Would this be good enough: > > # example using builtin BOD data frame > write.csv(cbind(Z = row.names(BOD), BOD), row.names = FALSE)
Thanks, Gabor, I like your solution better than mine. But, I still don't understand R's design and the lack of a column name for the row names. In R all database tables represented by a data.frame have a blank key name. This missing column name is the database "key". Having a mnemonic, non-blank, name for this "key" would be an improvement IHMO. I don't always have normalized data (in the database sense, http://www.devhood.com/tutorials/tutorial_details.aspx?tutorial_id=104, "Database Normalization") but R's lack of a key name makes keeping track of data more difficult, and makes communication about any database normalization more difficult. If one is using a database schema for selecting data, and paying careful attention to the keys, the key names are simply lost while in R. Why? I'm trying to politely challenge the design of R's current default behavior. Now we've got to do extra work to communicate necessary information, which doesn't make sense to me. The default behavior should be to communicate necessary information -- the key name -- instead of hiding it efg ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
