From gb at stat.umu.se  Thu Oct  7 09:00:01 2004
From: gb at stat.umu.se (Gran Brostrm)
Date: Thu Oct  7 09:00:07 2004
Subject: [Rd] sample suggestion
Message-ID: <20041007070001.GA2946@stat.umu.se>

I have been bitten by what is clearly described on the help page for
'sample', namely sampling from a population of size one. I agree that it is
convenient to have an exception if 'length(x) == 1', but my suggestion is
to enforce the exception only if 'x' is numeric. In any case, if x is not
numeric and of length 1, all you get is an error message.

I would like 'sample("tre", 1)' to return "tre", and 'sample(3, 1)' to
return a natural number less than 4. It seems easy to achieve that by
changing the line

if (length(x) == 1 && x >= 1) {

to

if (length(x) == 1 && is.numeric(x) && x >= 1) {

in 'sample'.

Isn't that a good idea? An alternative suggestion would be to implement
'resample' (from the examples) in 'base'.

G?ran

PS. Congratulations to the Core Team for reaching an excellent 2.0.0!   
-- 
 G?ran Brostr?m                    tel: +46 90 786 5223
 Department of Statistics          fax: +46 90 786 6614
 Ume? University                   http://www.stat.umu.se/egna/gb/
 SE-90187 Ume?, Sweden             e-mail: gb@stat.umu.se


[Rd] sample suggestion
Gran Brostrm