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Why does stringsAsFactors use capital letters to aid readability in R when most other commands seem to use . (e.g., as.factor)?
Is this an idiosyncrasy or part of a higher organizaton of the commands that I am not familiar with?
Is there any way to predict which commands will use capital letters and which will use .?
Thanks
A lot of the idiosyncrasies arise because of the heritage from the S language and compatibility with the implementation in S-PLUS. There has been a tendency in recent years to avoid new functions with names that include a
.as a separator to avoid confusion with S3 methods. This hasn’t been change retrospectively because of backwards compatibility and a desire to be faithful to functions from S/S-PLUS days.Since
_was deprecated as an alternative to<-, some authors have used it in function names; an example are packages of Hadley Wickham, but there are plenty of others.The lack of a strictly adhered standard can be confusing, and certainly adds to the learning curve, but is something you have to live with.