[R] outer problem

[Erich Neuwirth]

thank you,
i also looked into the definition of outer and now i understand what is
happening.
but now i have some more questions
on how to vectoruce functions.
lapply and sapply essentially allow to vectorise a fucntion with one
argument.
but is there a way of vectorizing a 2 argument function such that
the 2 arguments lists are "run through" sybchronously?

in lisp

(mapcar (lambda (x y) (* x y)) (1 3 5) (2 4 6))

produces the list (1*2 3*4 5*6)
(not really, this is just a description of hiw it works).

lapply and sapply accept more than one list arguments,
but then work on the cross product.

lapply(1:3,2:4,FUN=function(x,y)x*y)
sapply(1:3,2:4,FUN=function(x,y)x*y)

will returns lists and arrays with 9 elements, not with 3 elements.
is there a "natural" way of running through lists in sync, like mapcar
does?




> You're misunderstanding outer().
> 
> outer(x,y,f) does just one call to f with arguments created by stacking x
> and y together in the right way, so f has to be vectorised.
> 
> In any case, var(X) returns the covariance matrix of X, much more
> efficiently.
> 
>         -thomas
> 
> Thomas Lumley
> Assistant Professor, Biostatistics
> University of Washington, Seattle

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Erich Neuwirth, Computer Supported Didactics Working Group
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