any updates w.r.t. lapply, sapply, apply retaining classes
? ?In the example I give above, the impact might seem small, but the implications are *huge*. ?This means that I am, in effect, not allowed to use *any* of the vectoring functions in 'R', which avoid performing loops thereby speeding up process time extraordinarily. ?Many can sympathize that 'R' is ridiculously slow with "for" loops, compared to other languages. ?But that's theoretically OK, a good statistician or data analyst should be able to work comfortably with matrices and vectors.
Two comments: * sapply is generally only _slightly_ faster than a for loop * it's almost always better to use vapply instead of sapply. But I agree that simplify2array should be a generic so that you can write custom methods to support new classes. Hadley
Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair Department of Statistics / Rice University http://had.co.nz/