[R] Confusing concept of vector and matrix in R

[Matthew Keller]

Rolf: "Well then, why don't you go away and design and build your own
statistics and data analysis language/package to replace R?"

What a nice reply! The fellow is just trying to understand R. That
response reminds me of citizens of my own country who cannot abide by
any criticism of the USA: "If you don't like it, why don't you leave?"
Classy.

I have sympathies with the author. When I first began using R
(migrating from Matlab), I also found the vector concept strange,
especially because I was doing a lot of matrix algebra back then and
didn't like the concept of conflating a row vector with a column
vector. But I've since gotten used to it and can hardly remember why I
struggled with this early on. Perhaps your experience will be similar.

Best of luck!

Matt



On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 7:40 PM, Charles C. Berry <cberry at tajo.ucsd.edu> wrote:
> On Mon, 26 Apr 2010, Stu wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> One subtlety is that the drop argument only works if you specify 2 or
>> more indices e.g. [i, j, ..., drop=F]; but not for a single index e.g
>> [i, drop=F].
>
> Wrong.
>
>> a <- structure(1:5,dim=5)
>> dim(a)
>
> [1] 5
>>
>> dim(a[2:3,drop=F]) # don't drop regardless
>
> [1] 2
>>
>> dim(a[2,drop=F]) # dont' drop regardless
>
> [1] 1
>>
>> dim(a[2:3,drop=T]) # no extent of length 1
>
> [1] 2
>>
>> dim(a[2,drop=T]) # drop, extent of length 1
>
> NULL
>
>
>>
>> Why doesn't R complain about the unused "drop=F" argument in the
>> single index case?
>
> In the example you give (one index for a two-dimension array), vector
> indexing is assumed. For vector indexing, drop is irrelevant.
>
> HTH,
>
> Chuck
>>
>> Cheers,
>> - Stu
>>
>> a = matrix(1:10, nrow=1)
>> b = matrix(10:1, ncol=1)
>>
>> # a1 is an vector w/o dim attribute (i.e. drop=F is ignored silently)
>> (a1 = a[2:5, drop=F])
>> dim(a1)
>>
>> # a2 is an vector WITH dim attribute: a row matrix (drop=F works)
>> (a2 = a[, 2:5, drop=F])
>> dim(a2)
>>
>> # b1 is an vector w/o dim attribute (i.e. drop=F is ignored silently)
>> (b1 = b[2:5, drop=F])
>> dim(b1)
>>
>> # b2 is an vector WITH dim attribute: a column matrix (drop=F works)
>> (b2 = b[2:5, , drop=F])
>> dim(b2)
>>
>>
>> On Mar 30, 4:08 pm, lith <minil... at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Reframe the problem. Rethink why you need to keep dimensions. I never
>>>> ever had to use drop.
>>>
>>> The problem is that the type of the return value changes if you happen
>>> to forget to use drop = FALSE, which can easily turn into a nightmare:
>>>
>>> m <-matrix(1:20, ncol=4)
>>> for (i in seq(3, 1, -1)) {
>>>     print(class(m[1:i, ]))}
>>>
>>> [1] "matrix"
>>> [1] "matrix"
>>> [1] "integer"
>>>
>>> ______________________________________________
>>> R-h... at r-project.org mailing
>>> listhttps://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>>> PLEASE do read the posting
>>> guidehttp://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>> PLEASE do read the posting guide
>> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>
>
> Charles C. Berry                            (858) 534-2098
>                                            Dept of Family/Preventive
> Medicine
> E mailto:cberry at tajo.ucsd.edu               UC San Diego
> http://famprevmed.ucsd.edu/faculty/cberry/  La Jolla, San Diego 92093-0901
>
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>
>



-- 
Matthew C Keller
Asst. Professor of Psychology
University of Colorado at Boulder
www.matthewckeller.com