[R] repeated searching of no-missing values

hadley wickham h.wickham at gmail.com
Thu Dec 11 01:12:29 CET 2008


> Perhaps... But plyr works only on **basic** data structures, and I referred
> to all **possible** data strucures (deliberately); so I stand by my
> statement and note that you did not contradict it.

To me the basic structures are vectors, matrices and arrays; lists;
and data frames (that these are not mutually exclusive categories).
If you master these three basic types, you can master any more complex
structure because it must be some combination of the simpler types.
Similarly, while each plyr function only works with one of the types,
you should be able to deal with any arbitrarily complex data structure
by combining multiple functions.

This approach doesn't generalise so well with truly recursive data
structures (e.g. trees) but these are rarely encountered in their
traditional CS form in R.

Hadley

-- 
http://had.co.nz/



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