From sdorairaj at gmail.com  Fri Jul 31 18:14:23 2009
From: sdorairaj at gmail.com (Sundar Dorai-Raj)
Date: Fri, 31 Jul 2009 09:14:23 -0700
Subject: [Rd] update.formula and backticked colons
In-Reply-To: <c9ce82b00907301430p1186243eq7f79cb503d8919ae@mail.gmail.com>
References: <c9ce82b00907301428y698e401by2c3334b41ff7fc4c@mail.gmail.com> 
	<c9ce82b00907301430p1186243eq7f79cb503d8919ae@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <c9ce82b00907310914ibc9abecr34bb03f89c0f8116@mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 2:30 PM, Sundar Dorai-Raj<sdorairaj at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 2:28 PM, Sundar Dorai-Raj<sdorairaj at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I just noticed the following in update.formula and I'm wondering if
>> this behavior is the intention of the developers. Here's an example:
>>
>> update(`a: b` ~ x, ~ . + y)
>>
>> Note now that the response has no backticks and is interpreted as a:b
>> (i.e. ":" is now an operator). This is because in update.formula the
>> call to terms.formula uses simplify = TRUE. I'm working with data that
>> has a lot of colons in their names and for reporting purposes I don't
>> want to use make.names to avoid this situation. I do have a solution
>> which simply avoids using update.formula, but I wonder if the
>> developers would consider removing the "simplify" argument and allow
>> it to be passed through "...", which is currently ignored by
>> update.formula. Alternatively, add a simplify=TRUE to the
>> update.formula call, which can manually be set to FALSE by the user.
>>
>> I would love to hear any comments or criticisms of my findings.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> --sundar
>>
>
> Forgot my version info
>
>> version
> ? ? ? ? ? ? ? _
> platform ? ? ? x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
> arch ? ? ? ? ? x86_64
> os ? ? ? ? ? ? linux-gnu
> system ? ? ? ? x86_64, linux-gnu
> status
> major ? ? ? ? ?2
> minor ? ? ? ? ?9.1
> year ? ? ? ? ? 2009
> month ? ? ? ? ?06
> day ? ? ? ? ? ?26
> svn rev ? ? ? ?48839
> language ? ? ? R
> version.string R version 2.9.1 (2009-06-26)
>

This bounced on me so I don't know if it actually made it through.
Sorry if this is a repost.

--sundar



[Rd] update.formula and backticked colons
Sundar Dorai-Raj