[Rd] sapply improvements

[William Dunlap]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Peter Dalgaard [mailto:p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk] 
> Sent: Wednesday, November 04, 2009 1:16 PM
> To: William Dunlap
> Cc: Duncan Murdoch; r-devel at r-project.org
> Subject: Re: [Rd] sapply improvements
> 
> William Dunlap wrote:
> > It looks good on following examples:
> > 
> >> z <- split(log(1:10), rep(letters[1:2],c(3,7)))
> >> sapply(z, length, FUN.VALUE=numeric(1))
> > Error in sapply(z, length, FUN.VALUE = numeric(1)) : 
> >   FUN values must be of type 'double'
> > 
> > (I'd like the error to say "... must be of type 'double',
> > not 'integer'", to give the user a fuller diagnosis of
> > the problem.)
> 
> Umm, not following too closely, but would it not be 
> preferable just to 
> coerce in such cases? I can see a lot of issues of the
> 
> if (x <= 0) NA else log(x)
> 
> variety otherwise.

Would you only want it to coerce upwards to FUN.VALUES's
type?  E.g., allow
   sapply(z, length, FUN.VALUE=numeric(1))
to return a numeric vector but die on
   sapply(z, function(zi)as.complex(zi[1]), FUN.VALUE=numeric(1))
If the latter doesn't die should it return
a complex or a numeric vector?  (I'd say it
needs to be numeric, but I'd prefer that it
died.)
  
Bill Dunlap
Spotfire, TIBCO Software
wdunlap tibco.com  

> 
> >> sapply(z, range, FUN.VALUE=c(Min=0,Max=0))
> >            a        b
> > Min 0.000000 1.386294
> > Max 1.098612 2.302585
> > 
> > Exactly matching the typeof's and using the names
> > for row.names on matrix output seem good to me.
> >  
> > Bill Dunlap
> > Spotfire, TIBCO Software
> > wdunlap tibco.com  
> > 
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: Duncan Murdoch [mailto:murdoch at stats.uwo.ca] 
> >> Sent: Wednesday, November 04, 2009 12:24 PM
> >> To: William Dunlap
> >> Cc: michael.m.spiegel at gmail.com; r-devel at stat.math.ethz.ch
> >> Subject: sapply improvements
> >>
> >> On 11/4/2009 12:15 PM, William Dunlap wrote:
> >>>> -----Original Message-----
> >>>> From: r-devel-bounces at r-project.org 
> >>>> [mailto:r-devel-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of 
> Duncan Murdoch
> >>>> Sent: Wednesday, November 04, 2009 8:47 AM
> >>>> To: michael.m.spiegel at gmail.com
> >>>> Cc: R-bugs at r-project.org; r-devel at stat.math.ethz.ch
> >>>> Subject: Re: [Rd] error in install.packages() (PR#14042)
> >>>>
> > ... 
> >>>> For future reference:  the problem was that it assigned 
> >> the result of 
> >>>> sapply() to a subset of a vector.  Normally sapply() 
> >> simplifies its 
> >>>> result to a vector, but in this case the result was empty, so 
> >>>> sapply() 
> >>>> returned an empty list; assigning a list to a vector coerced 
> >>>> the vector 
> >>>> to a list, and then the "invalid subscript type 'list'" came 
> >>>> soon after.
> >>> I've run into this sort of problem a lot (0-long input to sapply
> >>> causes it to return list()).  A related problem is that 
> >> when sapply's
> >>> FUN doesn't always return the type of value you expect for some
> >>> corner case then sapply won't do the expected simplication.  If
> >>> sapply had an argument that gave the expected form of FUN's output
> >>> then sapply could (a) die if some call to FUN didn't return 
> >> something
> >>> of that form and (b) return a 0-long object of the correct form
> >>> if sapply's X has length zero so FUN is never called.  E.g.,
> >>>    sapply(2:0, function(i)(11:20)[i], 
> FUN.VALUE=integer(1)) # die on
> >>> third iteration
> >>>    sapply(integer(0), function(i)i>0, 
> FUN.VALUE=logical(1)) # return
> >>> logical(0)
> >>>
> >>> Another benefit of sapply knowing the type of FUN's 
> return value is
> >>> that it wouldn't have to waste space creating a list of 
> FUN's return
> >>> values but could stuff them directly into the final output 
> >> structure.
> >>> A list of n scalar doubles is 4.5 times bigger than 
> >> double(n) and the
> >>> factor is 9.0 for integers and logicals.
> >>
> >> What do you think of the behaviour of the sapply function 
> below?  (I 
> >> wouldn't put it into R as it is, I'd translate it to C code 
> >> to avoid the 
> >> lapply call; but I'd like to get the behaviour right before 
> >> doing that.)
> >>
> >> This one checks that the length() and typeof() results are 
> >> consistent. 
> >> If the FUN.VALUE has names, those are used (but it doesn't 
> >> require the 
> >> names from FUN to match).
> > ...
> > 
> > ______________________________________________
> > R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
> 
> 
> -- 
>     O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Øster Farimagsgade 5, Entr.B
>    c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     PO Box 2099, 1014 Cph. K
>   (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph:  
> (+45) 35327918
> ~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)              FAX: 
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>