Re: [R] inconsistent behavior of summary function

2011-10-04 Thread Brian Diggs
I'm going to put on my fire suit and wade in (see inline) On 10/4/2011 8:11 AM, Bert Gunter wrote: On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 7:42 AM, Jeanne M. Spicerwrote: I'm not sure how returning an incorrect result is ever a 'positive' feature It is **not** "incorrect"; perhaps unexpected, but that is not

Re: [R] inconsistent behavior of summary function

2011-10-04 Thread Uwe Ligges
On 04.10.2011 16:42, Jeanne M. Spicer wrote: I'm not sure how returning an incorrect result is ever a 'positive' feature but at least the documentation could more clearly warn users that this method behaves differently in these cases -- summary(rock[,1]) vs summary(rock[,1:2]) -- and that th

Re: [R] inconsistent behavior of summary function

2011-10-04 Thread Jeanne M. Spicer
I'm not sure how returning an incorrect result is ever a 'positive' feature but at least the documentation could more clearly warn users that this method behaves differently in these cases -- summary(rock[,1]) vs summary(rock[,1:2]) -- and that the method can and does return incorrect results wi

Re: [R] inconsistent behavior of summary function

2011-10-04 Thread Bert Gunter
On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 7:42 AM, Jeanne M. Spicer wrote: > I'm not sure how returning an incorrect result is ever a 'positive' feature > > It is **not** "incorrect"; perhaps unexpected, but that is not the same. > but at least the documentation could more clearly warn users that this > method be

Re: [R] inconsistent behavior of summary function

2011-10-04 Thread Bert Gunter
You are right, but this is difficult or impossible to really solve. The problem is that summary() is an S3 generic(?UseMethod) -- so essentially it can mean anything and do anything depending on the structure to which it's applied. In your case, the structures were a data frame and a vector (that

Re: [R] inconsistent behavior of summary function

2011-10-04 Thread Rolf Turner
On 04/10/11 19:58, Daniel Malter wrote: I have not read the manual, but I drew 1 random normal vectors and 1 random Poisson vectors of length 1 and was unable to reproduce this behavior. Can you provide an example (self-contained code) that reproduces this problem? The OP *did* provi

Re: [R] inconsistent behavior of summary function

2011-10-04 Thread Daniel Malter
I have not read the manual, but I drew 1 random normal vectors and 1 random Poisson vectors of length 1 and was unable to reproduce this behavior. Can you provide an example (self-contained code) that reproduces this problem? Thanks, Daniel Jeanne M. Spicer wrote: > > The summary fu