From ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk  Thu Aug  5 12:28:05 1999
From: ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk (ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk)
Date: Thu, 5 Aug 1999 13:28:05 +0200 (MET DST)
Subject: cbind is not generic as claimed, omits labels where S has them (PR#239)
Message-ID: <199908051128.NAA28801@pubhealth.ku.dk>

(1) ?cbind claims

     The generic functions `cbind' and `rbind' take a
     sequence of vector and/or matrix arguments and combine
     them as the columns or rows, respectively, of a matrix.

Note:

     The method dispatching is not done via `UseMethod(..)',
     but by C-internal dispatching.  Therefore, there's no
     need for, e.g., `rbind.default'.

but my cbind.ts does not get called, and try the following:

cbind.my <- function(...)
{
    stop("used cbind.my")
}
a <- b <- 1:3
cbind(a, b)
class(a) <- "my"
cbind(a, b)
     [,1] [,2]
[1,]    1    1
[2,]    2    2
[3,]    3    3

This is incorrect.

(2) S would give 
     a b 
[1,] 1 1
[2,] 2 2
[3,] 3 3
(and stop on the second cbind call).

and this discrepancy is hardly an improvement!

Could someone who can understands the c/rbind code please sort this out.
(It looks pretty arcane to me, and surely should not be special-casing data
frames.)

I used both of 

> R.version
           _                   
platform   sparc-sun-solaris2.6
arch       sparc               
os         solaris2.6          
system     sparc, solaris2.6   
status                         
status.rev 0                   
major      0                   
minor      64.2                
year       1999                
month      July                
day        3                   
language   R                   

> R.version
           _                           
platform   sparc-sun-solaris2.6        
arch       sparc                       
os         solaris2.6                  
system     sparc, solaris2.6           
status     Under development (unstable)
status.rev 0                           
major      0                           
minor      65.0                        
year       1999                        
month      August                      
day        05                          
language   R                           



-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595


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cbind is not generic as claimed, omits labels where S has them (PR#239)
ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk