dnorm and pnorm - why are the x and q arguments different?

General
1

Hi,

Does anyone know why the argument for x and q are different in dnorm and pnorm?

It seems like they represent the same thing?

Thanks!

2

See help(normal), which covers qnorm and rnorm, as well as dnorm and qnorm.

The q and x arguments are vectors of quantiles. p is a vector of probabilites and n is a number of observations. In each case, these are positional, so it doesn't really matter how whether identified in the argument

dnorm(x = your_vector)

is equivalent to

dnorm(your_vector)

x <- 0
dnorm(x = 0) == 1/sqrt(2*pi)
#> [1] TRUE
dnorm(x) == 1/sqrt(2*pi)
#> [1] TRUE

As for the naming of the arguments, I speculate that these arise from conventions among statisticians.

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