[R] [R-pkgs] Plyr 1.7

[Hadley Wickham]

# plyr

plyr is a set of tools for a common set of problems: you need to
__split__ up a big data structure into homogeneous pieces, __apply__ a
function to each piece and then __combine__ all the results back
together. For example, you might want to:

  * fit the same model each patient subsets of a data frame
  * quickly calculate summary statistics for each group
  * perform group-wise transformations like scaling or standardising

It's already possible to do this with base R functions (like split and
the apply family of functions), but plyr makes it all a bit easier
with:

  * totally consistent names, arguments and outputs
  * convenient parallelisation through the foreach package
  * input from and output to data.frames, matrices and lists
  * progress bars to keep track of long running operations
  * built-in error recovery, and informative error messages
  * labels that are maintained across all transformations

Considerable effort has been put into making plyr fast and memory
efficient, and in many cases plyr is as fast as, or faster than, the
built-in equivalents.

A detailed introduction to plyr has been published in JSS: "The
Split-Apply-Combine Strategy for Data Analysis",
http://www.jstatsoft.org/v40/i01/. You can find out more at
http://had.co.nz/plyr/, or track development at
http://github.com/hadley/plyr. You can ask questions about plyr (and
data manipulation in general) on the plyr mailing list. Sign up at
http://groups.google.com/group/manipulatr.

Version 1.7------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* `rbind.fill`: if a column contains both factors and characters (in
different  inputs), the resulting column will be coerced to character
* When there are more than 2^31 distinct combinations `id`, switches
to a  slower fallback strategy using strings (inspired by `merge`)
that guarantees  correct results. This fixes problems with `join` when
joining across many  columns. (Fixes #63)
* `split_indices` checks input more aggressively to prevent segfaults.
   Fixes #43.
* fix small bug in `loop_apply` which lead to segfaults in certain
circumstances. (Thanks to Pål Westermark for patch)
* `itertools` and `iterators` moved to suggests from imports so that
plyr now  only depends on base R.

-- 
Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair
Department of Statistics / Rice University
http://had.co.nz/

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