R devel - Nov 2016 - ifelse() woes ... can we agree on a ifelse2() ?

For S Ellison, just clarifying, I am Suharto Anggono, not Martin Maechler.
"Martin et al.," from my previous E-mail was the beginning of message
from Gabriel Becker, that I quoted.
The quoted "still a bit disappointed that nobody has taken a look" is
from Martin Maechler.
In all of the proposed 'ifelse'-like functions so far, including from me
(that I labeled as 'ifelse2', following Martin Maechler) and from Martin
Maechler, the length of the result equals the length of 'test', like in
'ifelse'. There is no recycling of 'test'.



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> Just stating, in 'ifelse', 'test' is not recycled. As I
said in "R-intro: length of 'ifelse' result"
> (https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2016-September/073136.html),
ifelse(condition, a, b)
> returns a vector of the length of 'condition', even if 'a'
or 'b' is longer.
That is indeed (almost) the documented behaviour. The documented behaviour is
slightly more complex; '... returns a value _of the same shape_ as
'test''. IN principle, test can be a matrix, for example.
> A concrete version of 'ifelse2' that starts the result from
'yes':
> .. still a bit disappointed that nobody has taken a look ...
I took a look. The idea leaves (at least) me very uneasy. If you are recycling
'test' as well as arbitrary-length yes and no, results will become
frighteningly hard to predict except in very simple cases where you have
well-defined and consistent regularities in the data. And where you do, surely
passing ifelse a vetor of the right length, generated by rep() applied to a
short 'test' vector, will do what you want without messing around with
new functions that hide what you're doing.

Do you really have a case where 'test' is neither a single logical (that
could be used with 'if') nor a vector that can be readily replicated to
the desired length with 'rep'?

If not, I'd drop the attempt to generate new ifelse-like functions. 

S Ellison