[R] Partial sort?

[Duncan Murdoch]

rkevinburton at charter.net wrote:
> This is definitely a newbie question but from the documentation I have not been able to figure out what the partial sort option on the sort method does. I have read and re-read the documentation and looked at the examples but for some reason it doesn't register. Would someone attempt to explain what sort with a non-null partial array of indices does?
>
>   
It guarantees that those particular indices are sorted correctly, but 
doesn't guarantee anything else.  For example,

 > x <- 10:1
 > sort(x, partial=1)

guarantees that the first entry in x (i.e. 10) is placed correctly, but 
nothing else, and the result is:

 [1]  1  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2 10

Duncan Murdoch