dear all,
I want to give a little bump/ping to the issue of NA vs. NaN that came
up almost half a year ago; on April 13th Allin wrote (but admittedly
that was not the last message in the thread, so it may not be a conclusion):
<quote>
Good point. I still believe that 0*NA = 0 is fine, so long as NA
(unknown value) and NaN (invalid value) are not conflated. So I
agree we should ensure that the "genr" mechanism does not convert
NaN results to NA.
Strictly, NAs should be confined to values marked as such in
incoming data, values propagated via "genr" on NA input (other
than multiplication by zero), and values marked explicitly by the
user, as in "x[3] = NA" or via "zeromiss()".
</quote>
I'm torn between leaving this issue alone and giving the coders more
time to implement more things that are directly useful, or trying to
argue for this for version 2.0, on the grounds that it yields a
longer-term payoff...
My pragmatic solution would be to enter this into the feature request
tracker (actually it's been a while since I looked there, it may already
be in there... I will run off now to clean up that tracker...)
thanks,
sven