From Kurt.Hornik@ci.tuwien.ac.at  Mon Dec 11 22:25:34 2000
From: Kurt.Hornik@ci.tuwien.ac.at (Kurt Hornik)
Date: Mon, 11 Dec 2000 23:25:34 +0100
Subject: [Rd] row.names, rownames; colnames, no col.names?
In-Reply-To: <87d7eyvlnc.fsf@jeeves.blindglobe.net>
References: <87d7eyvlnc.fsf@jeeves.blindglobe.net>
Message-ID: <14901.21598.772009.161277@mithrandir.hornik.net>

>>>>> A J Rossini writes:

> There's a bit of a symmetry issue, which may or may not be important
> (led to 15 seconds of confusion until I got my bearings straight): 

> row.names, rownames; colnames, no col.names? 

> I _NOW_ realize the difference between row.names and rownames, but
> is there any reason not to have col.names for re-naming columns in a
> data.frame? 

> (if there is, I don't particular need to know it, but it might make a
> nice FAQ).

Re col.names, certainly not for 1.2.0.

I am personally not a big fan of advertising row.names, as I think it is
too close to the rownames of the matrix interpretation of data frames.
This is why R has abstract functions case.names() and variable.names(),
which would be my preference.

-k
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[Rd] row.names, rownames; colnames, no col.names?
Kurt Hornik