[Rd] There is pmin and pmax each taking na.rm, how about psum?

[Henrik Bengtsson]

On Sun, Nov 4, 2012 at 6:35 AM, Justin Talbot <jtalbot at stanford.edu> wrote:
>>
>> Then the case for psum is more for convenience and speed -vs-
>> colSums(rbind(x,y), na.rm=TRUE)), since rbind will copy x and y into a new
>> matrix. The case for pprod is similar, plus colProds doesn't exist.
>>
>
> Right, and consistency; for what that's worth.
>
>>> Thus, + should have the signature: `+`(..., na.rm=FALSE), which would
>>> allow you to do things like:
>>>
>>> `+`(c(1,2),c(1,2),c(1,2),NA, na.rm=TRUE) = c(3,6)
>>>
>>> If you don't like typing `+`, you could always alias psum to `+`.
>>
>> But there would be a cost, wouldn't there? `+` is a dyadic .Primitive.
>> Changing that to take `...` and `na.rm` could slow it down (iiuc), and any
>> changes to the existing language are risky.  For example :
>>     `+`(1,2,3)
>> is currently an error. Changing that to do something might have
>> implications for some of the 4,000 packages (some might rely on that being
>> an error), with a possible speed cost too.
>>
>
> There would be a very slight performance cost for the current
> interpreter. For the new bytecode compiler though there would be no
> performance cost since the common binary form can be detected at
> compile time and an optimized bytecode can be emitted for it.
>
> Taking what's currently an error and making it legal is a pretty safe
> change; unless someone is currently relying on `+`(1,2,3) to return an
> error, which I doubt. I think the bigger question on making this
> change work would be on the S3 dispatch logic. I don't understand the
> intricacies of S3 well enough to know if this change is plausible or
> not.
>
>> In contrast, adding two functions that didn't exist before: psum and pprod,
>> seems to be a safer and simpler proposition.
>
> Definitely easier. Leaves the language a bit more complicated, but
> that might be the right trade off. I would strongly suggest adding
> pany and pall as well. I find myself wishing for them all the time.
> prange would be nice as well.

Have a look at the matrixStats package; it might bring what you're looking for:

  http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/matrixStats

/Henrik

>
> Justin
>
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