Suggestion: Adding quick rowMin and rowMax functions to base package

Hi,

I wonder whether similarly to the very quick rowSums and colSums functions
in the base package, one could add quick functions that calculate the min or
max over rows / cols in a matrix. While apply(x,1,min) works, I found out by
profiling a program of mine that it is rather slow for matrices with a very
large number of rows. A quick functionality seems to be already there in the
functions pmax and pmin, but it is rather cumbersume to apply them to all
columns of a matrix (if one does not know how many columns the matrix has).
?Below, I have some code that shows a very unelegant implementation that
illustrates possible speed gains if apply could be avoided:

rowMin = function(x) {
? # Construct a call pmin(x[,1],x[,2],...x[,NCOL(x)])
? ?code = paste("x[,",1:(NCOL(x)),"]",sep="",collapse=",")
? ?code = paste("pmin(",code,")")
? ?return(eval(parse(text=code)))
}

# Speed comparison: Taking rowMin of a 1,000,000 x 10 matrix
x = matrix(rnorm(1e7),1e6,10)

# The traditional apply method
y=apply(x,1,min) # Runtime ca. 12 seconds

# My unelegant rowMin function
z=rowMin(x) # Runtime ca 0.5 seconds

Of course, the way the function rowMin is constructed is highly ineffective
if the matrix x has many columns, but maybe there is a simple way to adapt
the code from pmin and pmax to create quick rowMin, rowMax,... functions. I
don't know whether it is worth the effort, but I guess taking minima and
maxima over rows is a common task.

Best wishes,
Sebastian