From William.Venables@cmis.CSIRO.AU  Sun Jan 23 00:26:31 2000
From: William.Venables@cmis.CSIRO.AU (Bill Venables)
Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 10:26:31 +1000
Subject: tabulate
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 22 Jan 2000 10:24:51 GMT."
 <38898573.3BF7945A@Durham.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <200001230026.LAA16510@snowy.nsw.cmis.CSIRO.AU>

> Dear R-Developers,
> 
> Would it be possible / is it desirable to alter tabulate 
> so that the lower boundary
> can be set in addition to the upper boundary? eg,
> 
> tabulate(bin, low=min(1,bin), nbin=max(1,bin))
> 
> would silently ignore elements outside the range low..nbin
> 
> It is easy to get around this at present, of course,
> but seems natural to have a more flexible function. 
> [or should I be using another function?]

I would oppose it on the grounds that tabulate() is a low-level
function and making a change like this is likely to slow it down
(if marginally) and to hinder porting software from R to S, which
I regard as an important consideration, if not an over-riding one.

table() should be the usual function for everyday use (and using
this makes the change to tabulate() unnecessary), but on R the
difference in speed between table() and tabulate() can be
dramatic.  I would suggest improving the efficiency of table()
should be a fairly high priority.

Bill.

-- 
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Bill Venables, Statistician, CMIS Environmetrics Project.

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tabulate
Bill Venables