R-alpha: split() S/R mismatch?

[Ben Bolker]

  I *think* that split(x,f) in S/S-PLUS (SunOS 4, S-PLUS 3.2) by default
replicates f as many times as necessary to cover the length of x.  In R it
apparently doesn't.

  I have the following function:

matsplit <-
function (x, crit) 
{
        lapply(split(x, crit), matrix, ncol = ncol(x))
        #  x is a matrix, crit is a vector with length dim(x)[1] ...
        #   makes a list of matrices split by row
}

The following:

y _ cbind(matrix(1:10,ncol=2,byrow=T),rep(1:2,c(2,3)))
matsplit(y[,1:2],y[,3])

gives

$"1":
     [,1] [,2] 
[1,]    1    2
[2,]    3    4
 
$"2":
     [,1] [,2] 
[1,]    5    6
[2,]    7    8
[3,]    9   10
 
 in S-PLUS; in R it gives

Error in split(x, as.factor(f)) : argument lengths differ

 I can find a workaround.  Is this a bug, a feature, or just a difference?

Benjamin Bolker          Dep't of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology,
ben@eno.princeton.edu    Princeton University
tel: (609) 258-6886,     fax: (609) 258-1334

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