sequence()

R-help is not the list for R development questions: you didn't want help 
did you? --> moved to R-devel.

I do wonder why

sequence(c(0,-1))

[1]  1  0  1  0 -1

is considered useful.

Given that the definition seems flawed and I could not find any uses of 
this function in any package my reaction was to suggest the function be 
deprecated on the way to removal.  (I also do not understand why anyone 
would expect sequence() to do that and not one of the many things which 
seq() does.)

We certainly do not want to replace a function that works as described at 
a reasonable speed by one that does not work as described, however fast.

 	`Accuracy first, speed second'.

Function sequence() repeatedly concatenates
its output, and this is slow.

It is possible to improve on the performance of sequence by
defining

 myseq <- function(x){unlist(sapply(x,function(i){1:i}))}

I don't think you want sapply here, but lapply.  Try

myseq(c(2,2))

[,1] [,2]
[1,]    1    1
[2,]    2    2

sic!

The following session compares the  performance of
myseq(), and sequence(), at least on my G5:

identical(sequence(1:50),myseq(1:50))

[1] TRUE

system.time(ignore <- sequence(1:800))

[1] 1.16 0.88 2.07 0.00 0.00

system.time(ignore <- sequence(1:800))

[1] 1.14 0.84 1.99 0.00 0.00

system.time(ignore <- myseq(1:800))

[1] 0.02 0.02 0.04 0.00 0.00

system.time(ignore <- myseq(1:800))

[1] 0.03 0.00 0.03 0.00 0.00

(the time differential is even more marked for longer arguments).

and much less for more realistic shorter arguments.

Is there any reason why we couldn't use  this definition instead?

The fact that it sometimes gives the wrong answer, for one.

Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595