[R] Question about creating lists with functions as elements

[Craig P. Pyrame]

Dear list,

I am trying to construct a list of functions using rep.  I can't 
understand the following:

 > c(character, character) => list with two functions
 > rep(character, 2) => error

The error says that "object of type 'special' is not subsettable", and I 
have no idea what this means.  Would you please help me.

The purpose of doing the above is that I need to use scan for reading 
files that happen to be too large and a bit irregular for read.table.  
To make scan work, I need to specify the types of values in each column 
(record field).  I can specify the 'what' argument as follows:

 > records <- scan(..., what = list(character(0), character(0), 
integer(0), numeric(0), character(0), ...), ...)

but this quickly becomes boring for large enough records. (Why does not 
scan take a character string with class names, as read.table does, 
instead of a list with dummy objects?) So I am trying to do tricks, and 
one idea that seems pretty simple is to create a list of functions that 
create vectors of a particular type, and apply them (using lapply) to 
get a list of prototype objects:

 > types = lapply(c(rep(character, 2), integer, numeric, ...), 
function(type) type(0)) => error

But this fails, as above.  Why?  Why can c(character, character) create 
a list of two functions, but rep(character, 2) can't?

Another solution to my problem I could find (and you'll hopefully 
suggest an even better one) is to use class names instead, like so:

 > types = lapply(c(rep('character', 2), 'integer', 'numeric', ...), 
function(type) vector(type, 0))

but I am still curious why the above doesn't work as I would expect it to.

Best regards,
Craig