R devel - Jun 2005 - by should use match.fun

I noticed that, unlike similar functions, 'by' does not use match.fun,
e.g.
> by(iris, iris$Species, "summary")
Error in FUN(X[[1]], ...) : couldn't find function "FUN"

The 'by' code should have an initial line of:

FUN <- match.fun(FUN)

I don't get the point.  ?by says:

FUN a function to be applied to data frame subsets of data. 

It doesn't say FUN can be a character, and by(iris, iris$Species, summary)
works as expected.

Andy
> From: Gabor Grothendieck
> 
> I noticed that, unlike similar functions, 'by' does not use 
> match.fun, e.g.
> 
> > by(iris, iris$Species, "summary")
> Error in FUN(X[[1]], ...) : couldn't find function "FUN"
> 
> The 'by' code should have an initial line of:
> 
> FUN <- match.fun(FUN)
> 
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