I just realized that my idea of doing something without going into the extraction functions itself won't work :-( it was a nice dream, though.
The reason is that there is no general way to find out what the needed length is: At least I'm just writing a class where 2 kinds of columns are involved. I don't give a dim attribute, though. But I could, and then: how to know how it should be interpreted? > on the other hand, another possible solution would be to have ':' mean, > inside range selection expressions, not the usual sequence generation, > but rather specification of start and end indices: ... > this is daydreaming, of course, because such modifications would break > much old code, nothing would break if some other sign instead of : would be used. Maybe something like "end"... > and the benefit may not outweigh the effort. This might be true in any case. If I only think of how many lines of nrow, ncol, length & Co I could have written instead of posting wrong proposals.... Claudia -- Claudia Beleites Dipartimento dei Materiali e delle Risorse Naturali Università degli Studi di Trieste Via Alfonso Valerio 6/a I-34127 Trieste phone: +39 (0 40) 5 58-34 47 email: cbelei...@units.it ______________________________________________ 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.
