Re: [babel] R questions

["Sébastien Vauban" <wxhgmqzgwmuf-geNee64TY+gS+FvcfC7Uqw@public.gmane.org>]

Hi Thomas,

"Thomas S. Dye" wrote:
> On Dec 7, 2009, at 11:50 PM, Sébastien Vauban wrote:
>
>>> [2] I guess one could potentially think about dealing with missing values
>>>     more explicitly in org-babel. E.g. there could be a header arg
>>>     specifying what values are to be treatyed as missing. Nothing like
>>>     that exists currently.
>>
>> I guess such a feature would be required on the long term. Of course, even
>> specifying what would be the needed behavior is already difficult, I think.
>> One must have good knowledge of the multiple languages and environments,
>> and try to abstract the best behavior out of these.
>>
>> Side note -- I know, for example, that there is an option in Access to let
>> it consider the empty string ('') as the NULL value, or not. Clear.
>>
>> But what's a "NA" value in general?  Is 0 always a meaningful value as
>> numeric?  Context-sensitive..
>
> NA is a logical constant of length 1 which contains a missing value
> indicator. Whether or not 0 is a meaningful value as numeric depends on your
> data and the questions you are asking of it. You don't ask this question,

?  I thought I addressed that when asking (to myself) "Is 0 always a
meaningful value as numeric?" and answering [that it certainly is]
"context-sensitive.."


> but if I read this thread correctly and you are trying to workaround a data
> input problem with R in Org-babel,

No, you misread, or I mis-wrote ;-)

I wasn't speaking of R only, saying that "such a feature would be required on
the long term [... for] the multiple languages".

Thinking at shell-script (with empty strings), SQL code (with empty strings
and NULL values), etc.


> then replacing missing values with 0 in a numeric context to get around the
> Org-babel problem is NOT a good idea.

Implementing a fixed interpretation is NOT a good idea. I share your point of
view.

My comments were:

- I think we must be able to write a rule for interpreting "empty" (whatever
  it means) values;

- We should think at what's needed to cover the current and future needs, not
  focusing on one specific language (R), but thinking at all of them (shell
  commands, SQL, etc.).

Best regards,
  Seb

-- 
Sébastien Vauban



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