[Rd] Expanding partial names

Duncan Murdoch murdoch at stats.uwo.ca
Wed Mar 8 14:37:49 CET 2006


Whoops, just noticed that I cut when I should have copied.  The newArgs 
function should look like this:

newArgs <- function(..., Params) {
   f <- function(...) list(...)
   formals(f) <- c(Params, formals(f))
   names <- as.list(names(Params))
   names(names) <- names
   names <- lapply(names, as.name)
   b <- as.list(body(f))
   body(f) <- as.call(c(b[1], names, b[-1]))
   f(...)
}

Duncan Murdoch

On 3/7/2006 9:18 PM, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> Okay, here's my effort based on Deepayan's and Charles' ideas.  The 
> newArgs function is not what I'd call transparent, but I like the way 
> the wrapper looks.
> 
>  > newArgs <- function(..., Params) {
> +   f <- function(...) list(...)
> +   formals(f) <- c(Params, formals(f))
> 
> +   b <- as.list(body(f))
> +   body(f) <- as.call(c(b[1], names, b[-1]))
> +   f(...)
> + }
>  >
>  > lowlevel <- function(longname = 1) {
> +   cat("longname = ", longname, "\n")
> + }
>  >
>  > newDefaults <- list(longname=2)
>  >
>  > wrapper <- function (...)
> +   do.call("lowlevel", newArgs(..., Params=newDefaults))
> 
> newArgs sets up f to look like
> 
> function (longname = 2, ...) list(longname = longname, ...)
> 
> and then calls it.  The thing I like about this, as opposed to using 
> pmatch, is that I'm sure the partial matching is what's used by R's 
> argument matching, whereas that's only pretty likely with pmatch.
> 
> I also sort of like these lines:
> 
> +   names <- as.list(names(Params))
> +   names(names) <- names
> +   names <- lapply(names, as.name)
> 
> but maybe I should have named Params as names, so they looked like this:
> 
> +   names <- as.list(names(names))
> +   names(names) <- names
> +   names <- lapply(names, as.name)
> 
> And of course I like the fact that this seems to work, but we've seen 
> several versions that do that:
> 
>  > wrapper()
> longname =  2
>  > wrapper(longname=3)
> longname =  3
>  > wrapper(long=3)
> longname =  3
>  > wrapper(long=20)
> longname =  20
>  > wrapper(junk=20)
> Error in lowlevel(longname = 2, junk = 20) :
>          unused argument(s) (junk ...)
> 
> Duncan Murdoch
>



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