|
From: | John W. Eaton |
Subject: | Re: Deprecate nfields function? |
Date: | Sat, 01 Mar 2014 14:07:52 -0500 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20131005 Icedove/17.0.9 |
On 03/01/2014 01:15 PM, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
On 03/01/2014 12:06 PM, Lukas Reichlin wrote:On 01.03.2014, at 17:21, Rik<address@hidden> wrote:Would anyone be heartbroken if we deprecated the nfields function in version 4.2?Yes, I'm using it in the control package and I think it's a handy function.I'm indifferent about the shortcut being in the core (it's so short, doesn't seem to hurt), but why nfields() as opposed to numfield() to be more consistent with numel()?
I suspect nfields is older than numel (a name that was invented by TMW because length was already taken and defined in a strange way that is not equivalent to numel). And I just chose nfields because it seemed like a good idea the time. It's easy to look back and say that a past decision wasn't perfect. It's much harder to know whether a decision you make now will still seem like a good idea 20 years later...
jwe
[Prev in Thread] | Current Thread | [Next in Thread] |