similar to: SQL Primer for R

Dear R wizards: is there a clean way to assign to elements in a list? what I would like to do, in pseudo R+perl notation is f <- function(a,b) list(a+b,a-b) (c,d) <- f(1,2) and have c be assigned 1+2 and d be assigned 1-2. right now, I use the clunky x <- f(1,2) c <- x[[1]] d <- x[[2]] rm(x) which seems awful. is there a nicer syntax? regards, /iaw ---- Ivo Welch

Dear R wizards: This must have an obvious solution, but I am stumped. I can run a linear regression giving a matrix as the independent set of variables, but if I give a data frame (which I would like to give, because it should tell the linear model the names of the variables), R does not like it. An example is: N=20; y= rnorm(N); x.m <- (matrix( nrow=N, ncol=2 )); x.m[,1]=rnorm(N);

dear R wizards: here is the strange question for the day. It seems to me that nrow() is very slow. Let me explain what I mean: ds= data.frame( NA, x=rnorm(10000) ) ## a sample data set > system.time( { for (i in 1:10000) NA } ) ## doing nothing takes virtually no time user system elapsed 0.000 0.000 0.001 ## this is something that should take time; we need to add 10,000

I have a set of functions that I always load on startup. for example, there is my now infamous "is.defined()" function. I would like to add some documentation for these functions, so that I can do a ?is.defined inside R. The documentation tells me how to mark up Rd files is very good, but I wonder how one installs them for access by the R executable (on OSX for me). Do I drop

dear R wizards:? I am wrestling with reshape.? I have a long data set that I want to convert into a wide data set, in which rows are firms and columns are years. > summary(rin) firm fyear sim1 Min. :1004.00 Min. :1964.0 Min. : -1.00000 1st Qu.:1010.00 1st Qu.:1979.0 1st Qu.: -0.14334 Median :1016.00 Median :1986.0 Median : 0.00116 Mean

dear R experts---now I have a case where I want to estimate very large regression models with many fixed effects---not just the mean type, but cross-fixed effects---years, months, locations, firms. Many millions of observations, a few thousand variables (most of these variables are interaction fixed effects). could someone please point me to packages, if any, that would help me estimate such

Dear R wizards---I read Brian Ripley's post from 2004 which said that it was not possible to print to STDERR. Alas, I have more modest needs. I was wondering if it was possible to just send a string to STDERR with cat() while in CMD BATCH mode. Is it not possible to open STDERR in R? (Or does R use STDERR for itself and redirect it into the output stream?) This would be on a standard Unix

dear R experts---I am using the coef() function to pick off the coefficients from an lm() object. alas, I also need the standard errors and I need them fast. I know I can do a "summary()" on the object and pick them off this way, but this computes other stuff I do not need. Or, I can compute (X' X)^(-1) s^2 myself. Has someone written a fast se() function? incidentally, I think

this is not an important question, but I wonder why lm returns an error, and whether this can be shut off. it would seem to me that returning NA's would make more sense in some cases---after all, the problem is clearly that coefficients cannot be computed. I know that I can trap the lm.fit() error---although I have always found this to be quite inconvenient---and this is easy if I have only

As an end-user, I wonder about Revolution R. Is the relationship between Revolution R and the R community at-large a positive one? Do the former contribute to the development efforts of the latter? Is there a competitive aspect? is their forum competitive with r-help? any other thoughts? (most of all, I simply hope that they help some of the many helpful experts on this forum, who have

dear R group: I have the probably fairly common problem that I would like to have one code.R file do different things if it is invoked from a symbolic link, which should be easy to uncover. $ ln -s code.R code-0.R $ ln -s code.R code-1.R $ R CMD BATCH code-1.R what needs to be in code-1.R to put code-1.r into a character vector? help appreciated. regards, /ivo welch PS : I read

dear readers---I struggled with how to do nice fixed-effects regressions in large economic samples for a while. Eventually, I realized that nlme is not really what I needed (too complex), and all I really wanted is the plm package. so, I thought I would share a quick example. ################ sample code to show fixed-effects models? in R # create a sample panel data set with firms and years

dear R experts: has someone written a function that returns the results of by() as a data frame? ??of course, this can work only if the output of the function that is an argument to by() is a numerical vector. presumably, what is now names(byobject) would become a column in the data frame, and the by object's list elements would become columns. it's a little bit like flattening the by()

Dear R wizards: sorry to bug everyone twice in one day. I would like to annotate my graph by putting text strings into rectangle boxes with a little cartoon-like bubble with a lid pointing to a specific location. I can draw some sort of bubble-with-lid using the R primitives. (has anyone done something like this already?) the problem where I am stuck is that the width of the rectangle must

Dear R Wizards---is it possible to get R to show its current call stack (sys.calls()) upon an error abort? I don't use ESS for execution, and it is often not obvious how to locate how I triggered an error in an R internal function. Seeing the call stack would make this easier. (right now, I sprinkle "cat" statements everywhere, just to locate the line where the error appears.) Of

dear R wizards: an operation I execute often is the deletion of all observations (in a matrix or data set) that have at least one NA. (I now need this operation for kde2d, because its internal quantile call complains; could this be considered a buglet?) usually, my data sets are small enough for speed not to matter, and there I do not care whether my method is pretty inefficient (ok, I

dear R experts--- t <- 1:30 f <- function(t) { cat("f for", t, "\n"); return(2*t) } g <- function(t) { cat("g for", t, "\n"); return(3*t) } s <- ifelse( t%%2==0, g(t), f(t)) shows that the ifelse function actually evaluates both f() and g() for all values first, and presumably then just picks left or right results based on t%%2.

R version 2.5.0, under gentoo linux. This may be just my ignorance about naming conventions inside loops and subsets, but the following appears like a bug to me. y = c( 1963, 1963, 1964, 1964, 1965, 1965 ); r1= rnorm(6); d= data.frame ( y=y, r1=r1 ); ## note: I am not attach()ing anything anywhere ## this should give me two results, which it does ahw.y= subset(d, d$y==1963);

just a short beg for the next R 2.3 version: I know it is easy to add the sd into summary() in the source bowels of R---but everytime R is updated, my change disappears. :-(. I do not believe that R has an easy extension mechanism for univariate summaries, short of a function rewrite here. Could this please be added into R 2.3? Aside, a logical ordering might also be: mean sd min q1 med q3

dear R experts: does R have "static" variables that are local to functions? I know that they are usually better avoided (although they are better than globals). However, I would like to have a function print how often it was invoked when it is invoked, or at least print its name only once to STDOUT when it is invoked many times. possible without <<- ? sincerely, /iaw