From pdalgd at gmail.com  Wed Nov 14 20:10:45 2012
From: pdalgd at gmail.com (peter dalgaard)
Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2012 20:10:45 +0100
Subject: [Rd] Typo in documentation for reshape?
In-Reply-To: <Zen-1TYhVJ-0000St-FS@smarthost03.mail.zen.net.uk>
References: <Zen-1TYhVJ-0000St-FS@smarthost03.mail.zen.net.uk>
Message-ID: <570D420F-640F-420E-93B6-87ED4AAFF28A@gmail.com>


On Nov 14, 2012, at 19:15 , Michael Dewey wrote:

> When I go ?reshape I get told, amongst other things
> 
> new.row.names
> logical; if TRUE and direction = "wide", create new row names in long format from the values of the id and time variables.
> 
> This seems to me to be illogical, surely it should read direction = "long"?
> 
> Reading the code and observing its behaviour I find that (a) the default for new.row.names is in fact NULL (b) the default seems to give the behaviour described above for TRUE (c) it is tested in the code only as if(is.null(new.row.names)) or if(!is.null(new.row.names))
> 
> Note I am not complaining about the behaviour, it does what I would want and what seems to me to be the natural thing but I do not think it is quite as documented.
> 

I believe this, and a bit more, is in bug #15102. 

The report hasn't been acted upon, but not been dismissed either, so presumably there's general agreement that something is wrong, but someone needs to check the suggested fixups in detail.

It's quite amusing how issues can go unnoticed for years and then be reported by two different people within a week. Or is there perhaps a more direct reason that the two of you should happen to be on the same page?

-- 
Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Phone: (+45)38153501
Email: pd.mes at cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd at gmail.com



[Rd] Typo in documentation for reshape?
peter dalgaard