From bbolker @ending from gm@il@com  Mon Dec 17 17:01:34 2018
From: bbolker @ending from gm@il@com (Ben Bolker)
Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2018 11:01:34 -0500
Subject: [Rd] Unnecessary apostrophe in English base::summary() NA count
 output?
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References: <CAJqKk207x-HiM31d07mo=Y0bos5FtMb4XmiPXv8B2e-Z-LjXBw@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <CABghstSL-qpe9RQxXSet+Kuov-Usx-Mq+04Ysm53_xH=S7_LBQ@mail.gmail.com>

There seem to be a variety of opinions about style in this case; do
you omit the apostrophe ("NAs") because it's not a possessive or a
contraction, or do you include the apostrophe ("NA's") to clearly
distinguish the acronym from the plural form?

 I personally prefer "NAs" to "NA's" but both are defensible.

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/55970/plurals-of-acronyms-letters-numbers-use-an-apostrophe-or-not
https://brians.wsu.edu/2016/05/16/acronyms-and-apostrophes/ ("many
people object to it")

On Mon, Dec 17, 2018 at 10:20 AM Hernando Cortina <hcortina71 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  Hello, this is quite a minor issue but as summary() is in all likelihood
> one of the most widely used functions in R I decided to email this list.
> When producing a count of missing values, summary() in English generates an
> unnecessary and grammatically incorrect apostrophe (NA's rather than NAs)
> in its table header.  For example:
>
> > summary(c(1,2,NA,3,4,NA))
>    Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max.    NA's
>    1.00    1.75    2.50    2.50    3.25    4.00       2
>
> The issue can be traced to this file:
> https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk/src/library/base/R/summary.R
> Unless this is being done intentionally for some reason, the solution would
> seem to be to replace the string "NA's" with "NAs".  There are 9
> occurrences in the file.
>
> Thank you very much.
>
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>
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[Rd] Unnecessary apostrophe in English base::summary() NA count output?
Ben Bolker