I am grateful to Andy Liaw, Douglas Grove, Brian Ripley, Tony Plate,
Dirk Eddelbuettel and Sundar Dorai-Raj all of whom got together and
drilled sense into my skull. I would like to take some effort into
explaining what the question was, that I was grappling with, and the
(nice) R way of solving the question.
My apologies: I am still a victim of too many years of writing C, so
I'm a bit dense and it takes me a while to comprehend. :-) My code
fragments are not intended to be 'serious code', they are just written
for maximum readability (atleast to my C-damaged brain). Please
forgive me if I'm not yet quite doing idiomatic R. I'm trying to learn
the lingo!
My question:
When I have a f(x, y) and I do
sapply(list, f)
I know that sapply will run over list elems and run f() many
times. How do I make him iterate over x values as opposed to
iterating over y values? In:
sapply(x, f, 3)
how does sapply know that I mean:
for (i in 3:5) {
f(i, 3)
}
and not
for (i in 3:5) {
f(3, i)
}
How would we force sapply to use one or the other interpretation?
Here's what I learned.
Rule: sapply() uses your list to make 'the first arg' to the function.
When you say
> sapply(3:5, f)
he's going to do f(3), f(4) and f(5).
Rule: sapply() allows you to supply extra args which will be passed
into the function.
When you say
> sapply(3:5, f, z=2)
he's going to do f(3, z=2), f(4, z=2), f(5, z=2)
Fact: R does 'intelligent guesswork' when it comes to handling
function args. Watch:
> myfunction <- function(x, y) x*x + y
> myfunction(10,3)
[1] 103
In this case, he placed 10 as x and 3 as y because that's the
order that they came in.
> myfunction(y=3, x=10)
[1] 103
This works, even though they're in the wrong order, because I
explicitly said that the 1st is y and the 2nd is x.
> myfunction(y=3, 10)
[1] 103
This is interesting! I only disambiguated y. So he jumped to
the conclusion that the lonely one was x.
With this in hand, think of how sapply would behave. If you say
> sapply(3:5, f, 5)
He's going to do f(3, 5), f(4, 5), f(5, 5). In this case, R will infer
that you must mean x=3, y=5, and so on.
But if you say:
> sapply(3:5, f, x=5)
He's going to do f(3, x=5), f(4, x=5), f(5, x=5). In this case, R will
infer that you mean _y_ takes the value 3 in the first case! When you
say f(3, x=5), R understands that you are doing f(5,3) or
f(x=5,y=3). Through this behaviour, you can use sapply to apply list
elements to any parameter of a function, not just the 1st.
Hence, it's easy to use sapply to work over all elems of a list for
any arg of any function. Faced with a list and f(x,y,z), if you wanted
to iterate the values for z, you would say
> sapply(list, f, x=value, y=value)
He would repeatedly do things like f(list[i], x=value, y=value), and R
would crack that what you meant was for z to be list[i]. Cool!
To all those who helped me: I'm not sure I was accurately articulating
my question, but you helped me understand what I needed to find
out. Thanks! Hope this posting helps someone else out there.
--
Ajay Shah Consultant
ajayshah at mayin.org Department of Economic Affairs
http://www.mayin.org/ajayshah Ministry of Finance, New Delhi
