more about outer

this is my current answer to my own question.
should we have such a funcion in a more general version
(i.e. with an arbitraty number of argument lists, for n-ary
functions)
in the core language?

myouter<-function(x,y,fun){
t(sapply(x,function(arg1) sapply(y,function(arg2) fun(arg1,arg2))))
}

Erich Neuwirth <erich.neuwirth at univie.ac.at> writes:

this is my current answer to my own question.
should we have such a funcion in a more general version
(i.e. with an arbitraty number of argument lists, for n-ary
functions)
in the core language?

myouter<-function(x,y,fun){
t(sapply(x,function(arg1) sapply(y,function(arg2) fun(arg1,arg2))))
}

I'd be partial to this kind of constructions

vectorize2 <- function(f)
    function(x, y,...)
        sapply(seq, along=x, function(i)f(x[i],y[i],...))

so that you can simply do

outer(x, y, vectorize2(fun))

A similar technique for functions of one variable would be

vectorize <- function(f)
    function(x, ...)
        sapply(x, f)

The case of N variables is -um- interesting...

--
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907

thanks,

your original code did not wortk for me,
but the following version seems to work


vectorize2 <- function(f) 
    function(x, y,...)
        sapply(1:length(x), function(i)f(x[i],y[i],...))

vectorize2 <- function(f)
    function(x, y,...)
        sapply(seq, along=x, function(i)f(x[i],y[i],...))