[Rd] Column(row)wise minimum and maximum

[oliver]

On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 06:12:30PM +0000, Ravi Varadhan wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Currently, the "base" has colSums, colMeans.  It seems that it would be
> useful to extend this to also include colMin, colMax (of course, rowMin and
> rowMax, as well) in order to facilitate faster computations for large vectors
> (compared to using apply).  Has this been considered before?  Please forgive me
> if this has already been discussed before.
[...]

Not sure if the performance of apply is so much of a problem,
but also from a view of consistency of the provided
functions, I think offering such functions would make
it more clear and consitent to use R here, because
all those functions are then available for row and col
and the functionality is appended in the name (Mean, Sum etc.).

I think the basic things that should be available woud be:

 - mean
 - median
 - min
 - max
 - var
 - sd

If both then are available for rows and columns,
this would be fine.



Ciao,
   Oliver