[R] Indexing, and using an empty string as a name

[Prof Brian Ripley]

[Adding R-help back, as you did later.]

On Wed, 7 Nov 2007, Charilaos Skiadas wrote:

> On Nov 7, 2007, at 2:51 AM, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 6 Nov 2007, Charilaos Skiadas wrote:
>> 
>>> Hello all,
>>> 
>>> I ran into the following, to me unexpected, behavior. I have (for
>>> reasons that don't necessarily pertain to the question at hand, hence
>>> I won't go into them) the need/desire to use an empty string for the
>>> name of a vector entry.
>> 
>> The 'R Languge Definition' says
>>
>>  The string "" is treated specially: it indicates `no name' and matches
>>  no element (not even those without a name).
>> 
>> and from ?names
>>
>>  The name \code{""} is special: it is used to indicate that there is no
>>  name associated with an element of a (atomic or generic) vector.
>>  Subscripting by \code{""} will match nothing (not even elements which
>>  have no name).
>> 
>> so it should perhaps have been expected.
>
> It should indeed, if I had looked at ?names, which I should have thought of 
> doing. I wonder why ?"[" doesn't mention it though, especially the part 
> about: "Subscripting by "" will match nothing (not even elements which have 
> no name)."

Well, the help page of `[` is complex enough already, there was a link to 
the page for names, and this doesn't seem to have bitten many people. 
However, I have already added the information for the next version since 
there were other facts about character indexing that were not there and I 
created a new section for them.  However we try to organize it, 
information overload seems to be a problem for that help page.

I suspect that not everyone who has worked on the code/documentation was 
aware of the special status of "" ....

> What are the reasons for treating "" in a special way, btw? i.e. can't we use 
> NA to indicate "no name"? (Hm, come to think of it, NA means more that we 
> don't know the name, not that there isn't a name. So perhaps it makes sense 
> after all.)

It long predates the availability of character NAs (which S did not have), 
and as you say, it is not quite the same.

[...]

-- 
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)
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