Hi. I'm pretty new to R, but I've been programming in other languages for
some time. I have a couple of questions regarding programming with function
objects.
1. Is there a way for a function to refer generically to all its actual
arguments as a list? I'm thinking of something like the @_ array in Perl or
the arguments variable in JavaScript. (By "actual" I mean the ones that
were actually passed, as opposed to its formal arguments, as returned by
formals()).
2. I have a package in which most of the functions have the form:
the.function <- function(some, list, of, params) {
return( some.other.function(the.list.of.params.to.this.function));
}
Is there a way that I can use a loop to define all these functions?
In general, I'm looking for all the information I can find on the subject of
dynamic function definition (i.e. using code to automate the definition of
functions at runtime). I'm most interested in introspection facilities and
dynamic code generation. E.g. is it possible to write a module that
"redefines itself" when sourced? Or can a function redefine itself when
first run? Or how can a function find out about how it was called?
FWIW, Some of the things I'd like to do are in the spirit of a decorator in
Python, which is a function that take a function f an argument and return
another function g that is somehow based on f. For example, this makes it
very easy to write functions as wrappers to other simpler functions.
TIA!
KJ
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