R-alpha: apply()

[Kurt Hornik]

>>>>> Martyn Plummer writes:

> At 12:42 22/08/97, kurt.hornik@ci.tuwien.ac.at wrote:
>> The following is identical in R and S, but still strange ...
>> 
R> apply(matrix(1:20, nc = 4), 1, table)
>> [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5]
>> [1,]    1    1    1    1    1
>> [2,]    1    1    1    1    1
>> [3,]    1    1    1    1    1
>> [4,]    1    1    1    1    1
R> apply(matrix(rep(1, 20), nc = 4), 1, table)
>> [1] 4 4 4 4 4
R> apply(matrix(c(1:4, 1, 6 : 8), nc = 4), 1, table)
>> [[1]]
>> 1 3 7 
>> 2 1 1 
>> 
>> [[2]]
>> 2 4 6 8 
>> 1 1 1 1
>> 
>> -k

> It is strange, but logical.  The problem is that it's an undocumented
> feature. If the help page said something like "If the calls to FUN
> return vectors of different lengths then apply returns a list of
> length dim(x)[MARGIN]" then it would be less surprising. Or would you
> prefer that apply returns an error message if it can't coerce the
> result to an array?

No, some explanation would be fine.  But from the examples, I don't
think that we always get a list of a certain length ...

-k
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