Message-ID: <496E7865.5090100@stats.uwo.ca>
Date: 2009-01-14T23:42:29Z
From: Duncan Murdoch
Subject: Partial sort?
In-Reply-To: <20090114175913.TXXJV.1398958.root@mp06>
rkevinburton at charter.net wrote:
> This is definitely a newbie question but from the documentation I have not been able to figure out what the partial sort option on the sort method does. I have read and re-read the documentation and looked at the examples but for some reason it doesn't register. Would someone attempt to explain what sort with a non-null partial array of indices does?
>
>
It guarantees that those particular indices are sorted correctly, but
doesn't guarantee anything else. For example,
> x <- 10:1
> sort(x, partial=1)
guarantees that the first entry in x (i.e. 10) is placed correctly, but
nothing else, and the result is:
[1] 1 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 10
Duncan Murdoch