[Phylobase-devl] node retrieval

[Hilmar Lapp]

On Mar 5, 2008, at 10:17 AM, Ben Bolker wrote:

> Hilmar Lapp wrote:
>> On Mar 5, 2008, at 3:14 AM, Steve Kembel wrote:
>>> Are there any more decisions to be made about what to call things?
>>> Tips, internals, nodes, edges
>>> Descendant, ancestor, sister
>> I wouldn't use sister, use the more neutral 'sibling' instead.
>> There is also typically a distinction between parents versus   
>> ancestors, and children (or daughters) versus descendants (the  
>> first  ones being in direct relationship, and the latter ones  
>> direct or via  transitivity).
>> 	-hilmar
>
>
>   that's useful.  so my functions (ancestor, descendants,
> alldescendants, allancestors) could be (parent, children,
> descendants, ancestors) ... ?

That's right. allancestors() sounds confusing, for the above reasons.

Obviously you could just have ancestors(), with an option direct=TRUE| 
FALSE. You could also still have parents() and have it just delegate  
to ancestors(direct=TRUE). Personally that's probably what I would go  
with implementation-wise, but it may be more a matter of taste than  
anything else.

	-hilmar

-- 
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: Hilmar Lapp  -:-  Durham, NC  -:- hlapp at duke dot edu :
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