R-alpha: apply()

The following is identical in R and S, but still strange ...

R> apply(matrix(1:20, nc = 4), 1, table)
    [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5]
[1,]    1    1    1    1    1
[2,]    1    1    1    1    1
[3,]    1    1    1    1    1
[4,]    1    1    1    1    1
R> apply(matrix(rep(1, 20), nc = 4), 1, table)
[1] 4 4 4 4 4
R> apply(matrix(c(1:4, 1, 6 : 8), nc = 4), 1, table)
[[1]]
1 3 7 
2 1 1 

[[2]]
2 4 6 8 
1 1 1 1

-k

It is strange, but logical.  The problem is that it's an undocumented
feature. If the help page said something like "If the calls to FUN
return vectors of different lengths then apply returns a list of
length dim(x)[MARGIN]" then it would be less surprising. Or would you
prefer that apply returns an error message if it can't coerce the
result to an array?

Martyn

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