[Rd] cbind/rbind fail on matrixes containing lists (PR#6702)

[Warnes, Gregory R]

Hello Brian,

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Prof Brian Ripley [mailto:ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk]
> 
> There are no `matrixes containing lists'.  There are lists 
> which are also 
> matrices, but their contents are the vector elements  (unless 
> you meant 
> that it was a list of lists, which seems not be the case in 
> your example).
> In the absence of a reproducible example, it is not clear to 
> me exactly 
> what you want to do.
> 
> Here is a list matrix example:
> 
> A <- matrix(as.list(1:4), 2, 2)
> cbind(A, A)
> 

I was, in fact, using a matrix containing "list" elements.  

I did fail to provide the definition of my 'list matrix'.  It was simply:

> m1 <- matrix(list(NA),4,4)
> m1
     [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4]
[1,] NA   NA   NA   NA  
[2,] NA   NA   NA   NA  
[3,] NA   NA   NA   NA  
[4,] NA   NA   NA   NA  
> class(m1)
[1] "matrix"
> class(m1[1,1])
[1] "list"
> cbind(m1,m1)
Error in cbind(...) : cannot create a matrix from these types
> rbind(m1,m1)
Error in rbind(...) : cannot create a matrix from these types

> It appears to be intentional (line 950 of bind.c and the actual cbind
> code), in which case this is a documentation bug and I have 
> altered the
> docs.

Odd.

> Why not class(m1)?  It should be the same ....

But it is not:

> class(m1)
[1] "matrix"
> class(m1[1,1])
[1] "list"

-Greg


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