[Rd] New pipe operator

[Peter Dalgaard]

> On 7 Dec 2020, at 17:35 , Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan using gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On 07/12/2020 11:18 a.m., peter dalgaard wrote:
>> Hmm,
>> I feel a bit bad coming late to this, but I think I am beginning to side with those who want  "... |> head" to work. And yes, that has to happen at the expense of |> head().
> 
> Just curious, how would you express head(df, 10)?  Currently it is
> 
> df |> head(10)
> 
> Would I have to write it as
> 
> df |> function(d) head(d, 10)

It could be 

df |> ~ head(_, 10)

which in a sense is "yes" to your question.

> 
>> As I think it was Gabor points out, the current structure goes down a nonstandard evaluation route, which may be difficult to explain and departs from usual operator evaluation paradigms by being an odd mix of syntax and semantics. R lets you do these sorts of thing, witness ggplot and tidyverse, but the transparency of the language tends to suffer.
> 
> I wouldn't call it non-standard evaluation.  There is no function corresponding to |>, so there's no evaluation at all.  It is more like the way "x -> y" is parsed as "y <- x", or "if (x) y" is transformed to `if`(x, y).

That's a point, but maybe also my point. Currently, the parser is inserting the LHS as the 1st argument of the RHS, right? Things might be simpler if it was more like a simple binop.

-pd

> Duncan Murdoch
> 
>> It would be neater if it was simply so that the class/type of the object on the right hand side decided what should happen. So we could have a rule that we could have an object, an expression, and possibly an unevaluated call on the RHS. Or maybe a formula, I.e., we could hav
>> ... |> head
>> but not
>> ... |> head()
>> because head() does not evaluate to anything useful. Instead, we could have some of these
>> ... |> quote(head())
>> ... |> expression(head())
>> ... |> ~ head()
>> ... |> \(_) head(_)
>> possibly also using a placeholder mechanism for the three first ones. I kind of like the idea that the ~ could be equivalent to \(_).
>> (And yes, I am kicking myself a bit for not using ~ in the NSE arguments in subset() and transform())
>> -pd
>>> On 7 Dec 2020, at 16:20 , Deepayan Sarkar <deepayan.sarkar using gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> On Mon, Dec 7, 2020 at 6:53 PM Gabor Grothendieck
>>> <ggrothendieck using gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> On Mon, Dec 7, 2020 at 5:41 AM Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan using gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> I agree it's all about call expressions, but they aren't all being
>>>>> treated equally:
>>>>> 
>>>>> x |> f(...)
>>>>> 
>>>>> expands to f(x, ...), while
>>>>> 
>>>>> x |> `function`(...)
>>>>> 
>>>>> expands to `function`(...)(x).  This is an exception to the rule for
>>>>> other calls, but I think it's a justified one.
>>>> 
>>>> This admitted inconsistency is justified by what?  No argument has been
>>>> presented.  The justification seems to be implicitly driven by implementation
>>>> concerns at the expense of usability and language consistency.
>>> 
>>> Sorry if I have missed something, but is your consistency argument
>>> basically that if
>>> 
>>> foo <- function(x) x + 1
>>> 
>>> then
>>> 
>>> x |> foo
>>> x |> function(x) x + 1
>>> 
>>> should both work the same? Suppose it did. Would you then be OK if
>>> 
>>> x |> foo()
>>> 
>>> no longer worked as it does now, and produced foo()(x) instead of foo(x)?
>>> 
>>> If you are not OK with that and want to retain the current behaviour,
>>> what would you want to happen with the following?
>>> 
>>> bar <- function(x) function(n) rnorm(n, mean = x)
>>> 
>>> 10 |> bar(runif(1))() # works 'as expected' ~ bar(runif(1))(10)
>>> 10 |> bar(runif(1)) # currently bar(10, runif(1))
>>> 
>>> both of which you probably want. But then
>>> 
>>> baz <-  bar(runif(1))
>>> 10 |> baz
>>> 
>>> (not currently allowed) will not be the same as what you would want from
>>> 
>>> 10 |> bar(runif(1))
>>> 
>>> which leads to a different kind of inconsistency, doesn't it?
>>> 
>>> -Deepayan
>>> 
>>> ______________________________________________
>>> R-devel using r-project.org mailing list
>>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
> 

-- 
Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Phone: (+45)38153501
Office: A 4.23
Email: pd.mes using cbs.dk  Priv: PDalgd using gmail.com