should lapply preserve attributes?

On 19 Mar 2002, Timothy H. Keitt wrote:

Would it make sense to replace

	names(rval) <- names(X)

with

	attributes(rval) <- attributes(X)

?? I can, of course, make a local function for this, but wondered if
this change would be useful in general.

No, it would be positively harmful.  X might be a data frame, or a time
series .., but rval is only guaranteed to be the same length as X.  If you
know more, adjust the object returned by lapply.

Yes, nevermind. Ah, tiredness... I realized that's not what I meant
after hitting "send" (and that Brian would catch it before I could reply
to my own email! ;-).

What I want is to apply a function to a list of objects and have the
attributes of the objects copied to the resulting list items, e.g.,

out <- lapply(list(ts1=ts(1:10), ts2=ts(1:5)), sample)

and have 'out' be a list of time series instead of attributeless
vectors. Obviously the solution is to make a function that both permutes
the values and copies the attributes as well.

Tim

Timothy H. Keitt
Department of Ecology and Evolution
State University of New York at Stony Brook
Stony Brook, New York 11794 USA
Phone: 631-632-1101, FAX: 631-632-7626
http://life.bio.sunysb.edu/ee/keitt/
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