[Rd] often unnecessary duplicate in sapply / as.vector

[Thomas Lumley]

On Tue, 11 Jul 2006, Prof Brian Ripley wrote:

> On Fri, 7 Jul 2006, Thomas Lumley wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 7 Jul 2006, Martin Morgan wrote:
>>
>>> sapply calls lapply as
>>>
>>>    answer <- lapply(as.list(X), FUN, ...)
>>>
>>> which, when X is a list, causes X to be duplicated unnecessarily. The
>>> coercion is unnecessary for other mode(X) because in lapply we have
>>>
>>>    if (!is.list(X)) X <- as.list(X)
>>
>> That looks reasonable.
>
> And you have made the change.  Unfortunately it is not really reasonable,
> as is.list(X) does not test that X is a list (see its documentation) in
> the same sense as as.list, so pairlists are now passed to the internal
> code.

Where do we still get pairlists in interpreted code? I thought they had 
all been hidden.

> There's something rather undesirable going on here.  The internal code for
> lapply (in its current version, not the one I wrote) does the internal
> equivalent of
>
>    rval <- vector("list", length(X))
>    for(i in seq(along = X))
>        rval[i] <- list(FUN(X[[i]], ...))
>
> from the earlier
>
> lapply <- function(X, FUN, ...) {
>    FUN <- match.fun(FUN)
>    if (!is.list(X))
>        X <- as.list(X)
>    rval <- vector("list", length(X))
>    for(i in seq(along = X))
>        rval[i] <- list(FUN(X[[i]], ...))
>    names(rval) <- names(X)               # keep `names' !
>    return(rval)
> }
>
> so all that is needed is that X[[i]] work.
>
> For a pairlist [[i]] done repeatedly is very inefficient (since it starts
> at the beginning each time), so we *do* want to coerce pairlists here.

Or have a separate loop using CDR and CAR rather than [[, which would mean 
not having to copy X.


> On the other hand, we do not need to coerce expressions or atomic vectors
> for which [[]] works just fine.

Indeed.

 	-thomas

Thomas Lumley			Assoc. Professor, Biostatistics
tlumley at u.washington.edu	University of Washington, Seattle