Hello dear helpers, I am currently running a small R-crash course for beginners at my university, since I believe that there a far too few lectures about how to use R.
Thereby, I showed the '??' or 'help.search()' function to the students as well as the 'aggregate()' function with 'FUN=sd'. The code worked fine for me - as usual (in version 3.5.1) - but not for the students. Doing some research got me to the point, that in the current version (3.6.0), 'aggregate' cannot use 'sd' for data.frames with mixed columns of factors and numeric columns and throws an error (which is somewhat ok, since 'var()' is not applicable for factors, of course) instead of putting 'NA's into the respective columns like it does with 'FUN=mean' and like it does in the former version(s). Is this a bug or a feature? It would be nice to work with it, the way I am used to. Of course it is not difficult to work around this problem, but it is somewhat strange, why it was changed that way (if this was intended). Additionally, the 'help.search()' always just gives the result: "No results found", for all of my students. I didn't find any post about that issues so far, so I am not sure whether this are known issues (but all of my 10 students had this problem). If this were intended changes, I would be interested, what the reason is and whether there are direct workarounds (e.g. instead of using only numeric columns), for those issues. Otherwise I am looking forward to a fixed version. Thanks in advance for your help! Kind regards, Marvin Kiene Doctoral Student Department of Animal Ecology I, AG Prof. Laforsch University of Bayreuth 95440 Bayreuth Germany [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ 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.