[R-pkgs] new version of abind()

[Tony Plate]

There is a new version of the abind package on CRAN (abind_1.1-0).  abind() 
is a multi-dimensional generalization of cbind() and rbind() -- it can bind 
multiple 2-d matrices into a 3-d array, or bind 3-d arrays together, etc.

In this new version the behavior of the function abind() has been enhanced 
slightly (it can now accept a list as the first argument, removing the need 
to use do.call() in most situtations), and changed slightly (to no longer 
by default creates dimension names if none exist, because these are usually 
useless and mostly annoying).  There is also a new function in the package: 
adrop(), which does approximately what drop() does, but allows control over 
which dimensions are dropped.

Note also that the abind() function runs under S-plus as well (I believe 
adrop() does as well, but it is not as well tested).

Details:

2004-03-12

         * R/abind.R man/abind.Rd
         allow first argument of abind() to be a list of objects to be
         bound -- this avoids the need for do.call() when one wants to bind
         a list of objects

         * R/abind.R man/abind.Rd
         changed argument name 'use.anon.names' to the more intuitive
         'make.names' (the argument 'use.anon.names' still works)

         * R/abind.R man/abind.Rd
         changed default value for 'make.names' to FALSE (now more closely
         behaves like rbind() and cbind()).  This means that dimension
           names for dimensions that have no names are only constructed
           when requested, not by default.

         * R/adrop.R man/adrop.Rd
         added new function adrop().  This is a function like drop(), but it
           allows to user to specify which of the dimensions with extent one
           will be dropped.


Please let me know of any problems.

-- Tony Plate

Tony Plate   tplate at acm.org