From Thomas.Petzoldt at TU-Dresden.de  Sat Mar  7 18:38:45 2009
From: Thomas.Petzoldt at TU-Dresden.de (Thomas Petzoldt)
Date: Sat, 07 Mar 2009 18:38:45 +0100
Subject: [Rd] question
In-Reply-To: <49B2ACAF.5030905@pburns.seanet.com>
References: <49B23FA7.9090006@idi.ntnu.no>	<000325575fc2f3201e046488263f@google.com>	<971536df0903070628x46a4951dt9d14da97ea720dd0@mail.gmail.com>	<50d1c22d0903070638g2a2f65dexefc45b69d4118dfe@mail.gmail.com>
	<49B2ACAF.5030905@pburns.seanet.com>
Message-ID: <49B2B125.4030609@TU-Dresden.de>

Patrick Burns wrote:
> One idea of program design is that users
> should be protected against themselves.
> 
> It is my experience that users, especially
> novices, tend to over-split items rather than
> over-clump items.  The fact that items are
> returned by the same function call would
> argue to me that there is a connection between
> the items.
> 
> 
> Patrick Burns
> patrick at burns-stat.com
> +44 (0)20 8525 0696
> http://www.burns-stat.com
> (home of "The R Inferno" and "A Guide for the Unwilling S User")

Hi Gabor, Patrick, Ivo and vQ,

I agree with Patrick and Gabor that it is not needed. IMHO it is good 
design that a function (in a mathematical sense) returns ONE object, let 
it a single value, a list or an S3/S4 object. This can be passed to 
another function as a whole or can be splitted to its parts according to 
different needs. If only single parts are required, than I would suggest 
to use accessor functions preferably written as generics working on 
returned S3 or S4 objects. I'm strongly against going back to the past S 
behaviour and I wonder a little bit about this discussion. I like it to 
have a clean workspace with only a few objects.

Thomas Petzoldt



[Rd] question
Thomas Petzoldt