From bolker at ufl.edu  Wed Jun 10 16:06:07 2009
From: bolker at ufl.edu (Ben Bolker)
Date: Wed, 10 Jun 2009 10:06:07 -0400
Subject: [Rd] Reduce: extra args wishlist?
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.2.00.0906101454580.22065@gannet.stats.ox.ac.uk>
References: <4A2AF18D.8030805@ufl.edu>
	<alpine.LFD.2.00.0906101454580.22065@gannet.stats.ox.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <4A2FBDCF.4050003@ufl.edu>

Prof Brian Ripley wrote:
> I think the idiom of the languages from which this comes would indeed 
> to be use an anonymous function, and in R to use ... and no braces, as 
> in
> 
> Reduce(function(...) merge(..., by="state", all=TRUE), z)
> 
> But that's not the (ony) R idiom, so I am happy to add a ... argument 
> to Reduce.  Unfortunately the patch below is backwards (you have diffs 
> from old to new in 'patch' format), and we do need to patch the 
> documentation (which gets a bit ugly as ... has a different meaning 
> for another function on the Reduce help page).  I think I have sorted 
> these out, and will commit to R-devel shortly.

  Hmm.  Thanks.  Sorry about the patch glitch.  (On my Ubuntu system,
patch has a -R flag that would seem to take care of that ...)

  I accepted Kurt's explanation.  I'm curious what the protocol is when
R-core members differ?  (I would have guessed that conservatism would
rule, or the opinion of the original author of the functions (I don't
know who contributed Reduce et al.), but perhaps Kurt doesn't have
strong feelings about this ...

  cheers
    Ben



-- 
Ben Bolker
Associate professor, Biology Dep't, Univ. of Florida
bolker at ufl.edu / www.zoology.ufl.edu/bolker
GPG key: www.zoology.ufl.edu/bolker/benbolker-publickey.asc

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[Rd] Reduce: extra args wishlist?
Ben Bolker