From Prof Brian Ripley <ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk>  Wed Jan 20 13:09:47 1999
From: Prof Brian Ripley <ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk> (Prof Brian Ripley)
Date: Wed, 20 Jan 1999 13:09:47 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: dist function suggestion
Message-ID: <199901201309.NAA17441@toucan.stats.ox.ac.uk>


> Date: Wed, 20 Jan 1999 12:03:38 +0000 (GMT)
> From: Jonathan Rougier <J.C.Rougier@durham.ac.uk>
> To: Friedrich Leisch <Friedrich.Leisch@ci.tuwien.ac.at>
> cc: r-devel@stat.math.ethz.ch
> Subject: Re: dist function suggestion
> 
> On Wed, 20 Jan 1999, Friedrich Leisch wrote:
> 
> > dist is contained in the mva package which comes with (base) R. it
> > provides `"euclidian"', `"maximum"', `"manhattan"', `"canberra"' and
> > `"binary"' distances both in matrix and triangular form.
> 
> Thanks Fritz, but could I still make a general plea for a dist() that
> takes one OR two matrices?  I often need to find dist(X, Y) as a
> rectangular matrix (eg covariance calculations), and it is very
> inefficient to use dist(rbind(X, Y))  and then discard most of it. 

You will need to call it something else: dist is a clone of an S function,
and dist(X, "manhattan") is well-established usage.

I pointed out to R-core recently that "euclidian" will cause problems
for those who know how to spell it .... (-ean in my dictionaries, and
in S).

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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dist function suggestion
Prof Brian Ripley