I've defined my own version of summary.default,
that gives a better summary for highly skewed vectors.

If I call
  summary(x)
the method is used.

If I call
  summary(data.frame(x))
the method is not used.

I've traced this to lapply; this uses the new method:
  lapply(list(x), function(x) summary(x))
and this does not:
  lapply(list(x), summary)

If I make a copy of lapply, WITHOUT the environment,
then the method is used.

lapply <- function (X, FUN, ...) {
    FUN <- match.fun(FUN)
    if (!is.vector(X) || is.object(X))
        X <- as.list(X)
    .Internal(lapply(X, FUN))
}

I'm curious to hear reactions to this.
There is a March 2006 thread
    object size vs. file size
in which Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> Functions in R consist of 3 parts: the formals, the body, and the
> environment. You can't remove any part, but you can change it.
That is exactly what I want to do, remove the environment, so that
when I define a better version of some function that the better
version is used.

Here's a function to automate the process:
copyFunction <- function(Name){
  # Copy a function, without its environment.
  # Name should be quoted
  # Return the copy
  file <- tempfile()
  on.exit(unlink(file))
  dput(get(Name), file = file)
  f <- source(file)$value
  f
}
lapply <- copyFunction("lapply")

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