[Rd] problem with replicate and "..." (PR#8472)

[jason@cs.jhu.edu]

I am using R version 2.0.0 (2004-10-04) on Fedora Core 2.

This works correctly:

> foo <- function(x=1,y=2) { c(x,y) }
> bar <- function(n,...) c(n,foo(...))
> bar(10,3)
[1] 10  3  2

But it goes wrong if I replace "c" in bar with "replicate":

> foo <- function(x=1,y=2) { c(x,y) }
> bar <- function(n,...) replicate(n,foo(...))
> bar(10,3)
     [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5] [,6] [,7] [,8] [,9] [,10]
[1,]    0    0    0    0    0    0    0    0    0     0
[2,]    2    2    2    2    2    2    2    2    2     2

It is mysterious why x was bound to the apparently arbitrary
value 0 while y was left at its default.

The ... arguments to bar seems to be ignored altogether.
bar(10), bar(10,x=3), and bar(10,3,4) give the same result.
Furthermore, bar(10,extra=3) does not give an error.

Perhaps this mysterious behavior is unavoidable because of 
the kind of hack replicate is?

Thanks ...