R annoyances

Thanks all for pointing out that I can use 
	mtx[,1,drop=F]

-----Original Message-----
From: Uwe Ligges [mailto:ligges at statistik.uni-dortmund.de] 
Sent: Thursday, May 19, 2005 10:49 AM
To: Chalasani, Prasad
Cc: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
Subject: Re: [R] R annoyances


Chalasani, Prasad wrote:

Dear R Folks,
I'm a big fan of R, but there are a couple of things
that repeatedly annoy me, and I wondered if anyone
has neat ways to deal with them.

(a) When using "apply" row-wise to a matrix, it returns
   the results column-wise, and to preserve the original
   orientation, I've to do a transpose. E.g. I've to keep
   doing a transpose, which I consider to be quite annoying.

   transformed.mtx <- t(apply( mtx, 1, exp))

I'd rather type

   exp(mtx)

(b) When extracting 2 or more columns of a matrix, 
   R returns the result as a matrix, BUT when extracting
   just one column, it returns a vector/array, rather than
   a matrix, so I've to keep doing as.matrix, which is annoying.

sub.mtx <- as.matrix(mtx[,1])

Of course I could write a suitable function
	cols <- function(mtx,range) as.matrix(mtx[, range])
but then I lose the syntactic sugar of being able to say "[,1]".

The docs suggest:

   mtx[ , 1, drop = FALSE]


Uwe Ligges