[Rd] sapply improvements

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 05/11/2009 4:05 AM, Martin Maechler wrote:
>>>>>> "PD" == Peter Dalgaard <p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk>
>>>>>>     on Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:28:51 +0100 writes:
> 
>     PD> William Dunlap wrote: ...
>     >>> 
>     >>> if (x <= 0) NA else log(x)
>     >>> 
>     >>> variety otherwise.
>     >> 
>     >> Would you only want it to coerce upwards to FUN.VALUES's
>     >> type?  E.g., allow sapply(z, length,
>     >> FUN.VALUE=numeric(1)) to return a numeric vector but die
>     >> on sapply(z, function(zi)as.complex(zi[1]),
>     >> FUN.VALUE=numeric(1)) If the latter doesn't die should it
>     >> return a complex or a numeric vector?  (I'd say it needs
>     >> to be numeric, but I'd prefer that it died.)
> 
>     PD> I'd say that it should probably die on downwards
>     PD> coercion. Getting a double when an integer is expected,
>     PD> or complex instead of double as you indicate, is a
>     PD> likely user error. If not, then the user can always
>     PD> coerce explicitly inside FUN.
> 
> I agree with Peter: Do allow coercion downwards

You missed "not", right?  I.e. we would never coerce a double down to an 
integer or logical, but coercion in the other direction would be fine?

Duncan Murdoch


> 
>     PD> Another issue is whether one would want to go beyond the
>     PD> base classes of S (logical, integer, double, complex,
>     PD> character). For other classes, there may be no notion of
>     PD> "up" and "down" in coercion. Then again, sapply was
>     PD> always limited to what unlist() will handle, so e.g.
> 
>     >> sapply(1:10,FUN=function(i)Sys.Date())
>     PD>   [1] 14553 14553 14553 14553 14553 14553 14553 14553
>     PD> 14553 14553
> 
>     PD> as opposed to
> 
>     >> structure(rep(14553,10), class="Date")
>     PD>   [1] "2009-11-05" "2009-11-05" "2009-11-05"
>     PD> "2009-11-05" "2009-11-05" [6] "2009-11-05" "2009-11-05"
>     PD> "2009-11-05" "2009-11-05" "2009-11-05"
> 
> Well, using    
>       as(<prelim_result>,  class(<prototype>) )
> 
> would be really nice here.... 
> but alas, we are still not allowed to use  as(.,.) in base
> code which I'd tend to call  a "design bug" nowadays..
> 
> Martin
> 
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