[R] min(NA,"bla") != min("bla", NA)

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 26/09/2013 11:07 AM, Magnus Thor Torfason wrote:
> Just ran these two statements:
>
>   > min(NA,"bla")
> [1] NA
>
>   > min("bla", NA)
> [1] "bla"
>
> And then reran with explicit na.rm=FALSE
>
>   > min(NA,"bla", na.rm=FALSE)
> [1] NA
>
>   > min("bla", NA, na.rm=FALSE)
> [1] "bla"
>
>
> That seems wrong. Would this be considered a bug or is there a way to
> explain these results in a different way?

I'd call it a bug.  The internal code does a lot of tricky things with 
NA values and type coercion, and it looks as though this particular 
combination got messed up.  I wonder if there are other cases, too?  
I'll take a look.

Duncan Murdoch