[rkward-devel] Potential Data editor bug

[Prasenjit Kapat]

Hi,

On Sat, Sep 25, 2010 at 7:45 AM, Thomas Friedrichsmeier
<thomas.friedrichsmeier at ruhr-uni-bochum.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Thursday 23 September 2010, Stefan Rödiger wrote:
>> > It should be mostly, but not entirely safe to edit such objects. If you
>> > edit a cell in one of the duplicate columns, all columns with the same
>> > name will be affected in the backend. However, in the editor, this will
>> > not become visible until you close and re-open the editor.
>
> the idea was to underline that there really is some danger associated with
> editing these objects, and thus to require a somewhat more conscious effort
> from the user.
>
> I suppose we could offer an option to run
>  names (x) <- make.unique (names (x))
> and re-open the object after that. I think it will be very rare for users to
> run into this, though.

I am not sure how these are implemented internally, but since we are
talking of improvements / fixes after the release, here is an idea
(and it relates to something that I had in mind for sometime):

Recent updates to the data editor do not display the column number,
which, to me is helpful at times. So, why not internally always use
the column number and use the column names only for displaying?
Although transformations like sort etc.. may not be implementable
using just column numbers, but we may be able to implement a layer in
between and let R handle the duplicated columns however it wants to..

What I am trying to say is that on the C++ end deal with only column
numbers. Is that possible keeping in mind that we want to provide an
interface for transformations in future?

Regards,
-- 
Prasenjit