Dear expeRts, I'm struggling a bit with arrays of lists. The nice thing about arrays is that one can easily access subsets. For example: arr. <- array(1:24, dim=c(2,3,4), dimnames=list(a=c("a1","a2"), b=c("b1","b2","b3"), c=c("c1","c2","c3","c4"))) arr.[,,4] mean(arr.[,,4]) # => easy to access all components for fixed third component Assume we have an array of lists, where the second list components are numeric. For example: a <- c("a1","a2") b <- 1:3 c <- c("c1","c2","c3","c4") arr <- array(list(), dim=c(length(a), length(b), length(c)), dimnames=list(a=a, b=c("b1","b2","b3"), c=c)) for(i in 1:length(a)){ for(j in 1:length(b)){ for(k in 1:length(c)){ arr[i,j,k][[1]] <- list(a=a[i], b=b[j], c=c[k]) } } } Assume further we want to compute the mean over all second components. But accessing them is not as trivial as before: h <- sapply(arr[,,4], `[[`, 2) # pick out second components for fixed third component; not even sure if this is fully correct though mean(h) The question is if there is a nicer way to compute h, that is to access all second components in the lists? Cheers, Marius