Classes created when restructuring a vector

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#1

Just a small detail and I don't know whether it is of relevance or not. Following the "Hands-on programming with R" book in the chapter about Classes I entered the following code (## indicates console output):

die = 1:6
class(die)

"integer"

dim(die) <- c(2, 3)
class(die)

"matrix" "array"

According to the book the class of die in the end should be "matrix" only. For some reason my R turned the first row into a matrix and the second row into an array. Does anyone know the reason for that and how this can be resolved?

#2

Is the book written prior to R version 4 release ?
A matrix is the special case of a two-dimensional array. Since R 4.0.0, inherits(m, "array") is true for a matrix m.

#3

Okay, but what's the point of classifying the first row as a matrix and the second as an array?

#4

This is not what has occurred. The object has two classes. There is no row wise relationship as you suppose.

#5

But when I type "die[class(die)=="array"]" it prints:
[1] 2 4 6
and when I type "die[class(die)=="matrix"]" it prints:
[1] 1 3 5

But that might be some invalid syntaxing with this kind of data type.

#6

this evaluates to FALSE TRUE ,because matrix the first class is not array and array the second class is array.
vice versa for testing if class(die)=="matrix")

In other words, its a coincidence, matrix is the first class entry, array is the 2nd. you are indexing into the array/matrix with these numbers, and get parts of the array/matrix that correspond to those numbers, but this does not signify membership of parts of the array/matrix to the respective classes.

Going a little deeper, this is a good example of it being problematic practice to use the string based results of class(x) to understand whether an object is or isnt a class member. Often its way better in your programming to use an is.y(x) style function to answer that for you in a binary way.

is.array(die)
is.matrix(die)