dist function suggestion

[Jonathan Rougier]

On Wed, 20 Jan 1999, Friedrich Leisch wrote:

> dist is contained in the mva package which comes with (base) R. it
> provides `"euclidian"', `"maximum"', `"manhattan"', `"canberra"' and
> `"binary"' distances both in matrix and triangular form.

Thanks Fritz, but could I still make a general plea for a dist() that
takes one OR two matrices?  I often need to find dist(X, Y) as a
rectangular matrix (eg covariance calculations), and it is very
inefficient to use dist(rbind(X, Y))  and then discard most of it. 
Cheers, Jonathan. 

Jonathan Rougier                       Science Laboratories
Department of Mathematical Sciences    South Road
University of Durham                   Durham DH1 3LE

"[B]egin upon the precept ... that the things we see are to be 
 weighed in the scale with what we know"  (Meredith, 1879, The Egoist)

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