From macrakis at alum.mit.edu  Fri Mar 20 15:17:02 2009
From: macrakis at alum.mit.edu (Stavros Macrakis)
Date: Fri, 20 Mar 2009 10:17:02 -0400
Subject: [Rd] [R] which.na
In-Reply-To: <49C36FE2.7070407@stats.uwo.ca>
References: <816b5ce40903191837y58f6dc0bw98f5cdbd41f11484@mail.gmail.com>
	<46B8F50B47374D0FB12E205F51C291FA@DD4XFW31>
	<18883.26089.830116.969445@lynne.math.ethz.ch>
	<49C36FE2.7070407@stats.uwo.ca>
Message-ID: <8b356f880903200717t76075da2vd5fb0762031d49c9@mail.gmail.com>

There are many other useful extensions one might imagine along these lines.

For instance, we could have an argument for stopping the 'which'
calculation at the first result (or the first N results), which is
often useful (cf. any).

But I think it would be much cleaner for things like this to be done
in a compiler.  I suppose another possibility would be to have
low-level interfaces like which(a, test=xxx, count=nnn) which could be
used for optimization or for a source-to-source optimizer.

              -s

On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 6:28 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
> Martin Maechler wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> "CAPE" == Charles Annis, P E
>>>>>>> <Charles.Annis at statisticalengineering.com>
>>>>>>> ? ?on Thu, 19 Mar 2009 22:46:10 -0400 writes:
>>>>>>>
>>
>> ? ?>> ?is.na
>> ? ?>> x <- c(NA, 3, 4, 5, NA)
>> ? ?>> which(is.na(x))
>> ? ?CAPE> [1] 1 5
>>
>> well, of course.
>>
>> But note that ?which.na(.) could be implemented to be faster (because
>> needing much less memory) than the above,
>> notably when ?x ?is large and ?has only few NAs
>>
>> But this now has *REALLY* ?changed into a topic belonging to
>> R-devel, not R-help
>>
>> --> hence I've diverted the thread to there.
>>
>> I have recently entertained similar thoughts, i.e. wished for R
>> functions that compute ? ? ? ? ? ?which( function_returning_logical(..) )
>> and also
>> ? ? ? ? ? ?any( function_returning_logical(..) )
>>
>> directly {on .Internal i.e. C-level} instead of going to
>> construct the potentially huge logical vector.
>>
>> For what functions should this happen?
>> I agree that ?is.na() is one of them; but then, why not
>> ? ?is.nan() / ?is.finite() too?
>>
>> Instead of defining a slew of such functions ?which.foo(), which.bar(),
>> any.foo(), any.bar(), etc,
>> it would be nice to have a generic interface such as
>>
>> ? whichApply(x, is.na)
>> ? whichApply(x, is.nan)
>>
>> ? anyApply(x, is.na)
>> where internally, for some functions {in a given internal
>> table}, the fast shortcut would be used, and for others the
>> interface would be equivalent to ?which( thatFunction( x ) )
>>
>
> A couple of different interfaces to the same idea:
>
> ?- which() could recognize a few thatFunction(x) calls before evaluating
> them, and do the fast internal version. ?(This is hard because it needs to
> know
> that the user hasn't redefined is.na, etc. ?Probably not worth doing.)
>
> ?- which() could gain a new arg, so that
>
> ? ? ?which(x, test=is.na)
>
> ? would do as your whichApply() does.
>
> Duncan Murdoch
>>
>> Martin Maechler, ETH Zurich (and R Core team)
>>
>>
>> ? ?CAPE> Charles Annis, P.E.
>>
>> ? ?CAPE> Charles.Annis at StatisticalEngineering.com
>> ? ?CAPE> phone: 561-352-9699
>> ? ?CAPE> eFax: ?614-455-3265
>> ? ?CAPE> http://www.StatisticalEngineering.com
>>
>> ? ?CAPE> -----Original Message-----
>> ? ?CAPE> From: r-help-bounces at r-project.org
>> [mailto:r-help-bounces at r-project.org] On
>> ? ?CAPE> Behalf Of Santosh
>> ? ?CAPE> Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2009 9:37 PM
>> ? ?CAPE> To: r-help at r-project.org
>> ? ?CAPE> Subject: [R] which.na
>>
>> ? ?CAPE> Hi R- users
>>
>> ? ?CAPE> I was wondering if there is any function equivalent to which.na
>> used in S+?
>>
>> ? ?CAPE> Thanks much in advance!
>>
>> ? ?CAPE> Regards,
>> ? ?CAPE> Santosh
>>
>> ? ?CAPE> [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>
>> ? ?CAPE> ______________________________________________
>> ? ?CAPE> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
>> ? ?CAPE> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>> ? ?CAPE> PLEASE do read the posting guide
>> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> ? ?CAPE> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible
>> code.
>>
>> ? ?CAPE> ______________________________________________
>> ? ?CAPE> R-help at r-project.org mailing list
>> ? ?CAPE> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>> ? ?CAPE> PLEASE do read the posting guide
>> http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> ? ?CAPE> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible
>> code.
>>
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>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>
>
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[Rd] [R] which.na
Stavros Macrakis