Message-ID: <AF003EF88447964B88823C3F50A6AB750ACFD46B@gsnbp25es.firmwide.corp.gs.com>
Date: 2005-05-19T14:36:44Z
From: Chalasani, Prasad
Subject: R annoyances
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))
(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]".