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<blockquote type="cite"><div>I guess I must have missed it, but has anyone anywhere (in this</div><div>thread, a FR or something) actually present a (concrete) compelling</div><div>situation where allowing duplicate column names was actually useful?</div></blockquote><div><div>True, Not quite compelling situations so far. The only example I've seen (in this thread) is reg. data presentation purpose (from eddi). I don't quite know exactly in what way, still. I can understand although, that the data by itself sometimes maybe available in such format. But one can always make unique names while loading.</div></div><div><br></div><div><blockquote type="cite"><div>I'm hard pressed to come up with any situation where (purposefully)</div><div>keeping duplicate column names in a data.table has more benefit than</div><div>downside. Seems to me that if this ever happens, it most certainly</div><div>would be by mistake.</div></blockquote></div><div><div>I agree.</div></div><div><br></div>
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<div><div><blockquote type="cite"><div>In the case of cbinding two data.tables together that end up having</div><div>two duplicate names, I'd imagine unique-ing the names of the</div><div>data.tables and firing a warning that this was done would be most</div><div>useful (uniqueness priority would be from left to right as the</div><div>data.tables are passed into the cbind call)</div></blockquote></div><div><div>Unless there's a nice argument why this (unique-ing the names) would be bad or in which case keeping duplicate names would be good, I agree with you on this point as well.</div></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Arun</div><div><br></div></div>
<p style="color: #A0A0A8;">On Sunday, November 3, 2013 at 1:10 AM, Steve Lianoglou wrote:</p>
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<span><div><div><div>Hi,</div><div><br></div><div>On Sat, Nov 2, 2013 at 8:41 AM, Arunkumar Srinivasan</div><div><<a href="mailto:aragorn168b@gmail.com">aragorn168b@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</div><div>[snip]</div><blockquote type="cite"><div><div>Overall, I agree keeping duplicate names may help some users. But then, the</div><div>potential side-effects should be marked with warnings/errors distinctly, in</div><div>all cases (and preferably documented).</div></div></blockquote><div>[/snip]</div><div><br></div><div>I guess I must have missed it, but has anyone anywhere (in this</div><div>thread, a FR or something) actually present a (concrete) compelling</div><div>situation where allowing duplicate column names was actually useful?</div><div><br></div><div>I'm hard pressed to come up with any situation where (purposefully)</div><div>keeping duplicate column names in a data.table has more benefit than</div><div>downside. Seems to me that if this ever happens, it most certainly</div><div>would be by mistake.</div><div><br></div><div>Can someone help me out here?</div><div><br></div><div>In the case of cbinding two data.tables together that end up having</div><div>two duplicate names, I'd imagine unique-ing the names of the</div><div>data.tables and firing a warning that this was done would be most</div><div>useful (uniqueness priority would be from left to right as the</div><div>data.tables are passed into the cbind call)</div><div><br></div><div>-steve</div><div><br></div><div>-- </div><div>Steve Lianoglou</div><div>Computational Biologist</div><div>Bioinformatics and Computational Biology</div><div>Genentech</div></div></div></span>
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