David, Your answer begs the question. What is the problem with non-(list or vector) of type language. To my eye both expression(abcd) and call("mean") look like they have non-missing values, hence I anticipated that they are not NA, and therefore that is.na() would return FALSE without a warning.
On the html email, I turned that off years ago. It looks like gmail (who handles my university's email accounts) turned it back on. I just turned it off again. I too find it very annoying to have to revisit setting changes that I didn't make. Thank you for letting me know. Rich On Wed, Nov 18, 2015 at 9:36 PM, David Winsemius <dwinsem...@comcast.net> wrote: > >> On Nov 18, 2015, at 5:54 PM, Richard M. Heiberger <r...@temple.edu> wrote: >> >> What is the rationale for the following warning in R-3.2.2? >> >>> is.na(expression(abcd)) >> [1] FALSE >> Warning message: >> In is.na(expression(abcd)) : >> is.na() applied to non-(list or vector) of type ‘expression’ > > Well, the R interpreter does think that this is not a list: > >> is.list(expression(abcd)) > [1] FALSE > > >> methods(is.na) > [1] is.na,abIndex-method is.na,denseMatrix-method > [3] is.na,indMatrix-method is.na,nsparseMatrix-method > [5] is.na,nsparseVector-method is.na,sparseMatrix-method > [7] is.na,sparseVector-method is.na.coxph.penalty* > [9] is.na.data.frame is.na.numeric_version > [11] is.na.POSIXlt is.na.raster* > [13] is.na.ratetable* is.na.Surv > > > So the rationale is probably the same as the rationale for this warning: > >> is.na(call("mean", 1:4)) > [1] FALSE FALSE > Warning message: > In is.na(call("mean", 1:4)) : > is.na() applied to non-(list or vector) of type ‘language' > >> [[alternative HTML version deleted]] > > > I’m somewhat puzzled at your use of HTML for an Rhelp posting. I thought you > were a longtime R user? > > ______________________________________________ >> R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see >> 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. > > David Winsemius > Alameda, CA, USA > ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see 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.