From ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk  Sat Apr 26 22:44:48 2008
From: ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk (Prof Brian Ripley)
Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2008 21:44:48 +0100 (BST)
Subject: [Rd] median methods
In-Reply-To: <905db6ff0804260546u5adf592cs190b914d09750ea9@mail.gmail.com>
References: <905db6ff0804260546u5adf592cs190b914d09750ea9@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.1.10.0804262134390.22028@gannet.stats.ox.ac.uk>

On Sat, 26 Apr 2008, Rob Hyndman wrote:

> Can we please have a ... argument in median() to make it possible to pass
> arguments to specific methods.

Not without a reasoned case -- see 'Writing R Extensions' as to why it is 
a non-trivial change that affects all existing methods (and there are 
some) -- also S4 setMethod("median") calls (which there are too).

There is also an argument as to where the ... should come -- probably

function (x, ..., na.rm = FALSE)

(but that could break some existing calls), and why should na.rm be on the 
generic as well (it is not for mean nor quantile, for example)?

So there have to be some pretty compelling arguments in favour.


> _____________________________
> Rob J Hyndman
> Professor of Statistics, Monash University
> Editor-in-Chief, International Journal of Forecasting
> http://www.robhyndman.info/
>
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

Hmm, we do explicitly ask you not to do send that.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at 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 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595



[Rd] median methods
Prof Brian Ripley