# DataFrames: why is \`df\[2,\]\` the same as \`df\[2\]\`?

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/dataframes-why-is-df-2-the-same-as-df-2/6053>\
**Category:** Data\
**Tags:** question, syntax\
**Created:** [September 24, 2017, 10:59pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/dataframes-why-is-df-2-the-same-as-df-2/6053 "2017-09-24T22:59:33Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 16

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![StefanKarpinski](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/stefankarpinski/32/24_2.png) [@StefanKarpinski](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/StefanKarpinski)\
**Post date:** [September 27, 2017, 6:09pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/dataframes-why-is-df-2-the-same-as-df-2/6053/16 "2017-09-27T18:09:33Z")

</div>

> [@nickeubank](#):
>
> In general, I have found the Julia community to be wonderful and exceedingly welcoming, but this feels like a bit of an excessive shutdown.

This wasn’t intended as a shut down – it’s to prevent you from wasting your time opening an issue for something that isn’t going to happen. To put this in perspective:

1. This would be a very disruptive change – a lot of code in the wild would need to be fixed, much of which is not on GitHub and therefore cannot be automatically updated.
2. This is a very R-specific feature that no other mainstream language I’m aware of has.
3. In the five years that Julia has been public, I don’t think this has ever come up before.
4. This is very much the 11th hour. Julia has been under development for eight years and Julia 1.0 is [imminent](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/1-0-roadmap/2643/12) – we are not considering basic syntax changes at this point.

The argument that this is a dangerous feature seems pretty overstated. Expecting that passing nothing has a distinct meaning from not passing anything actually strikes me as the more dangerous behavior. It should, however, certainly be documented as a difference from R.

> It sounds like an exception has been made for tuples – maybe array indexing can be another exception?

The exception in that case exists because parenthesizing expressions has a fairly well-established meaning (especially in mathematical expressions), which is different from constructing a 1-tuple. If there were more ASCII bracket pairs, we could use a different one for constructing tuples, but alas, there are only three and so parens ends up somewhat overloaded.

---

_[View the full topic](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/dataframes-why-is-df-2-the-same-as-df-2/6053)._