R devel - Oct 2011 - list of operations that preserve attributes

I've been trying to prepare some wrappers for optimization objective
functions and
gradients that use try() to check for computable functions. I'm also trying
to do scaling
as per optim() so that a number of methods that are available on CRAN and
R-Forge can use
parameter and function scaling. This got me into minor trouble when I scaled a
gradient or
Hessian and the "inadmissible" attribute I had created suddenly
disappeared. When I
discovered why -- that some operations don't preserve attributes -- I
started to look for
a list of which ops preserve attributes and which don't. The code snippet
below shows that
matrix multiplication (%*%) does not, while multiplication by a vector (simple
*) does.
I'm not really surprised that some ops don't preserve attributes,
particularly those that
are binary like multiplication, but it might be nice to know which operations
and special
functions do so.

rm(list=ls())
m<-matrix(1:4,nrow=2, ncol=2)
print(m)
attributes(m)
attr(m,"check")<-"***"
attributes(m)
bigm<-10*m
str(bigm)
bigm1<-diag(c(1,1))%*%m
str(bigm1)
bigm1<-c(1,2)*m
str(bigm1)
print(bigm1)
arraym<-as.array(m)
str(arraym)
tanm<-tan(m)
str(tanm)


Best,

John Nash

There is a description in the 'Blue Book' (Becker et al, 1988) of when 
attributes are supposed to be preserved, and R mostly conforms to it.

This is discussed somewhere relevant in the R documentation:  I would 
have to search for exactly where, so I leave that to you.

On Wed, 19 Oct 2011, John C Nash wrote:
> I've been trying to prepare some wrappers for optimization objective
functions and
> gradients that use try() to check for computable functions. I'm also
trying to do scaling
> as per optim() so that a number of methods that are available on CRAN and
R-Forge can use
> parameter and function scaling. This got me into minor trouble when I
scaled a gradient or
> Hessian and the "inadmissible" attribute I had created suddenly
disappeared. When I
> discovered why -- that some operations don't preserve attributes -- I
started to look for
> a list of which ops preserve attributes and which don't. The code
snippet below shows that
> matrix multiplication (%*%) does not, while multiplication by a vector
(simple *) does.
> I'm not really surprised that some ops don't preserve attributes,
particularly those that
> are binary like multiplication, but it might be nice to know which
operations and special
> functions do so.
>
> rm(list=ls())
> m<-matrix(1:4,nrow=2, ncol=2)
> print(m)
> attributes(m)
> attr(m,"check")<-"***"
> attributes(m)
> bigm<-10*m
> str(bigm)
> bigm1<-diag(c(1,1))%*%m
> str(bigm1)
> bigm1<-c(1,2)*m
> str(bigm1)
> print(bigm1)
> arraym<-as.array(m)
> str(arraym)
> tanm<-tan(m)
> str(tanm)
>
>
> Best,
>
> John Nash
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>
-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595