[R] Newbie: colSums() compared with Matlab's sum()

[Francesco Napolitano]

Hi all,

I'm trying to learn R after years of Matlab's experience. Here is an
issue I couldn't solve today.

Consider the following piece of code (written by memory):

for(i in 1:n){
    submat <- data[1:i,]
    C <- colSums(submat)
    }

The problem is that at the first iteration, data[1:1,] reduces to a
vector and colSums returns an error. This sounds really strange to me
because a sum-over-columns operation should have no problem working with
columns of length 1. Matlab's "sum()" works just fine in such case.

The error says that I need an at least 2D array. So I try using
matrix(data[1:i,]). Unfortunately this returns a column instead of a
row. So I could do t(matrix(data[1:i,])), but this would transpose the
also the sub-matrices from the 2nd iteration on. I could fix everything
with some "if" but it would be really terrible code :-/.

I'm sure I'm missing something because my neurons stick with Matlab
behaviour. Can you help me to understand what's wrong with my reasoning?

Thank you very much,
Francesco.