R-beta: Various R Questions and Comments

[Peter Dalgaard BSA]

morse at pobox.com (Doug Morse) writes:

> 
> Hi!
> 
> I've been using R for about nine months now -- it's great.  Nicely done!
> 
> Here are some questions / comments I have.  Some are trivialities, but I
> thought I'd mention them anyway.  Others are a bit more involved.  BTW,
> I run R (Version 0.61.1 Alpha) on RedHat Linux 4.1
> 
> 1.  Interrupt Key
> 
>     How is one supposed to interrupt a command?  In S-Plus, one uses
>     the 'Escape' key.  In R, I can press my terminal's Interrupt
>     key (Ctrl-C), but this only works *once*.  After that, the event
>     seems to get ignored.  This is a nuicance for two reasons:  (a) I
>     can't interrupt a command but once in a session, and (b) at the
>     "> " prompt, I can't press Ctrl-C to abort my many typing errors
>     but once a session as well.

This is a bug in the readline library. Upgrade to 2.1/3.0.

> 2.  Sourcing MS-DOS Files
> 
>     I also use R on my laptop (Win95) and often transfer files
>     back and forth between it and my linux host.  R doesn't
>     seem to like this much -- I always have to convert [newlines]
>     to [newlines-carriage returns] and back.  Not a big deal, but
>     a bit annoying.  Could 'source' not be modified to auto-detect
>     end-of-line method?

Probably, but you could also make a habit of copying your files with
mcopy -t ...

> 
> 3.  Coercing Types within a DataFrame
> 
>     This is a more serious problem.  In S-Plus, I can run:
>     
>         myframe <- read.table('mydata.dat', T);
>         myframe[, 'Steps'] <- as.factor(myframe[, 'Steps']);
> 

That looks like a bug. However, this works: 

> data(airquality)
> airquality$"Day"<-factor(airquality$"Day")
> airquality["Day"]<-codes(airquality["Day"])

and upcoming versions will allow:
> airquality<-transform(airquality,Day=factor(Day))


> 4.  Anovalist.lm
> 
..
>     
>     For example, the following should be allowed:
> 
>     -----
>     Analysis of Variance Table
>     
>     Model 1: Satisfaction + Age ~ Anxiety
>     Model 2: Satisfaction ~ Age + Severity + Anxiety
>     
>        Res.Df  Res.Sum-Sq  Df  Sum-Sq       F  Pr(>F)
>     1      21        2152
>     2      19        2012   2   139.9  0.6609  0.5279
>     -----
>     
>     It represents a test of whether beta1 = -1.0 and beta2 = 0.0
>     using the generalized linear test statistic (see "Applied

Wouldn't this be better done using offsets?

> 5.  AOV
> 
>     Any word on 'aov' and friends?  Or alternatively, getting 'lm' (and

Ross has been talking about it for a while now. Doug Bates has done
some work on lme() and is close to having something releasable there.

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907

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