The evolution of the reshape packages
As mentioned before, reshape2
was a complete rewrite of the reshape
package, based on around 5 years of experience in using and developing the latter. This update also included some trade-offs, as the original reshape tasks were split among multiple packages. Thus, reshape2
now offers a lot less compared to the kind of magic features that were supported by reshape
. Just check, for example reshape::cast
; especially the margins
and add.missing
argument!
But as it turns out, even reshape2
offers a lot more than simply melting and casting data frames. The birth of the tidyr
package was inspired by this fact: to have a package in the Hadleyverse that supports easy data cleaning and transformation between the long ...
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