On 29/03/17 11:03, William Dunlap wrote:
I think that the suggestion I made, in response to a posting by
Barry Rowlingson, that the first argument of lapply() be given the name of
".X" rather than just-plain-X, would be (a) effective, and (b) harmless.
It would break any call to *apply() that used X= to name the first
argument. There are currently 3020 such calls in the R code in CRAN.
Okay. Scratch that idea.
One can avoid the problem by creating the function given as the FUN
argument when one calls lapply() and the like. Don't give that
function arguments named "X", "FUN", "USE.NAMES", etc. and perhaps
make use of R's lexical scoping to avoid having to use many arguments
to the function. E.g., instead of
sapply(1:5, sin)
use
sapply(1:5, function(theta) sin(theta))
or instead of
myY <- 3
sapply(1:5, atan2, y=myY)
use
myY <- 3
sapply(1:5, function(x) atan2(myY, x))
Again, all very sound advice but it does not address the problem of
there being a trap for young players. The advice can only be applied by
a user only if the user is *aware* of the trap.
At this point it would appear that the problem is fundamentally
unsolvable. :-(
cheers,
Rolf
--
Technical Editor ANZJS
Department of Statistics
University of Auckland
Phone: +64-9-373-7599 ext. 88276
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