[R] style question: returning multiple arguments - structure or list

Kevin Murphy murphyk at cs.berkeley.edu
Fri Jul 27 23:18:42 CEST 2001


I have a question about what is considered good style in R.

I have a function  which returns several arguments, say [x,y,z]=f(),
where sometimes I only care about the first few
(so in Matlab, I can write e.g., [x,y] = f()).

In R, there seem to be 2 ways to write this, both unsatisfying (to me):

LIST
f <- function() {
  ...
  list(x=x,y=y,z=z)
}
res <- f()
x <- res$x; y <- res$y; z <- res$z


STRUCTURE
f <- function() {
  ...
  structure(x,y=y,z=z)
}
x <- f()
y <- attr(x,"y"); z <- attr(x, "z")

Which  is considered better style, or does it just depend on the
problem?


Kevin
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