[R] Avoiding another loop

[Prof Brian D Ripley]

On Mon, 29 Jan 2001, Michael Roberts wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Is there a fancy way I can use a function (like apply)
> to avoid a the follwoing loop, or otherwise make this more
> efficient?  It fills a 3-d array, one matrix at a time.
> "nsize" is big, and efficiency is important.
>
> for (i in 1:nsize) simy[,,i] <- myfunction(p1,p2, ...)
>

You will need to tell us a lot more. At present it appears that you are
doing the same calculation nsize times, which is of course easy to avoid.

Avoiding loops in R is by no mean always useful or effective.  There are
myths about that go back to long-forgotten versions of S, in which for
loops were  very much to be avoided.   Up to a point *vectorization* is
worthwhile, the point being where handling large vectors becones expensive.


-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html
Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe"
(in the "body", not the subject !)  To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch
_._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._