[R] alternate methods to perform a calculation

[dxc13]

Consider a data frame (x) with 2 variables, x1 and x2, having equal values. 
It looks like:

x1   x2
1    1
2    2
3    3

Now, consider a second data frame (xk):
xk1   xk2
0.5    0.5
1.0    0.5
1.5    0.5
2.0    0.5
0.5    1
1.0    1
1.5    1
2.0    1
0.5    1.5
1.0    1.5
1.5    1.5
2.0    1.5
0.5    2
1.0    2
1.5    2
2.0    2

I have written code to calculate some differences between these two data
sets; the main idea is to subtract off each element of xk1 from each value
of x1, and similarly for xk2 and x2.  This is what I have:

w1 <- array(NA,dim=c(nrow(xk),length(x$x1)))
w2 <- array(NA,dim=c(nrow(xk),length(x$x2))) 
for (j in 1:nrow(xk)) {
	w1[j,] <- abs(x$x1-xk$xk1[j])
	w2[j,] <- abs(x$x2-xk$xk2[j])
}

Is there  a way to do the above calculation without use of a FOR loop? 
Thank you

Derek


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