[Rd] pipes and setNames

[Avi Gross]

Gabor,

It is always interesting to see suggestions for how to extend R, especially what is suggested to 
be base R. But generally extensions need to be needed not just wanted and the ramifications 
must be studied.

I am curious if you looked at existing pipe-like implementations in various packages to see how or 
if they support such functionality.

There are many things we can wish for but with some care if nonstandard evaluation is allowed.

For example, should we allow multiple instances of the underscore (or dot) character to each be 
replaced by the same input? That can be tricky. 

But a trivial solution is to not use the anonymous function but write your own small accessory function. 
I wrote this trivial one:

renamer <- function(x, fun) { names(x) <- fun(names(x)); x }


You can then do this:


x |> renamer(toupper)


Or use tolower or sort or lots of other functions with no arguments.

It is easy to generalize this to functions that allow additional arguments:


renamer2 <- function(x, fun, ...) { names(x) <- fun(names(x), ...); x }


x |> renamer2(sort, decreasing=TRUE)


Clearly this is not a general solution and a suggestion that I might like is to allow a
compound condition in the pipeline that lets you capture the argument into a named 
variable and then use it as you wish. BUT in a very real sense the anonymous 
function syntax gives you something like that even if a tad ugly to you. However 
things that look wrong to you or may make no sense to others may well 
be avoided. 

So your suggestion for an extension to existing functions to allow not repeating the 
name twice makes sense but R supports many attributes you may want to be 
able to manipulate in a pipeline including classes, dimensions, column names, 
row names and much more you can add on your own arbitrarily.

What method might be more generalizable to solve many such problems 
if used along with the new or previous pipes?






-----Original Message-----
From: Gabor Grothendieck <ggrothendieck using gmail.com>
To: r-devel using r-project.org <r-devel using r-project.org>
Sent: Sun, Apr 17, 2022 8:21 am
Subject: [Rd] pipes and setNames


When trying to transform names in a pipeline one can do the following

where for this example we are making names upper case.



  BOD |> (\(x) setNames(x, toupper(names(x))))()



but that seems a bit ugly and verbose.



1. One possibility is to enhance setNames to allow a function as a

second argument.  In that case one could write:



  BOD |> setNames(toupper)



2. One can already do the following with the existing `with` but is

quite verbose:

  BOD |> list() |> setNames(".") |> with(setNames(., toupper(names(.))))

but could be made simpler with a utility function.



This utility function is not as good for setNames but would still

result in shorter code than the anonymous function in the example at

the top of this email and is more general so it would also apply in

other situations too.  Here R would define a function with. (note dot

at end) which would be defined and used as follows.



  with. <- function(data, expr, ...) {

    eval(substitute(expr), list(. = data), enclos = parent.frame())

  }



  BOD |> with.(setNames(., toupper(names(.))))



with. is not as efficient as straight pipes but in many cases such as

this it does not really matter and one just wants to get it done

without the parenthesis laden anonymous function.



Having both of these two would be nice to make it easier to use R pipes.



-- 

Statistics & Software Consulting

GKX Group, GKX Associates Inc.

tel: 1-877-GKX-GROUP

email: ggrothendieck at gmail.com



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