On 06/15/2014 07:34 AM, Michael Lawrence wrote:
Hi guys,
Was just checking out GenomicFiles and was a little surprised that the
arguments to the REDUCER are different depending on iterate=TRUE vs.
iterate=FALSE. In my often flawed opinion, iteration should not be a
concern of the REDUCER. It should be oblivious to the iteration mode. In
other words, when iterate=TRUE, it is a special case of having two objects
to combine, instead of multiple.
My 'rationale' was that one would choose iterate=FALSE when one required all
elements to perform the reduction. I thought of the list (rather than ...) as
the general R data structure for representing N elements, with a special case
(consistent with Reduce) made for the pairwise reduction of iterate=TRUE. Either
way, the two cases (x, y vs. list(), x, y vs. ...) seem to require some
explaining to the user. Is there a clear better choice? You're the second person
to trip over this, so I guess there's a crack in the sidewalk...
Martin
What would be convenient (but unnecessary) is to detect from the formal
arguments whether REDUCER is variadic or list-based. In other words, if
REDUCER is defined like function(...) { } it is called via do.call(),
otherwise it is passed the list.
Thoughts? Maybe I'm totally confused?
Michael
[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
_______________________________________________
Bioc-devel@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/bioc-devel
--
Computational Biology / Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
1100 Fairview Ave. N.
PO Box 19024 Seattle, WA 98109
Location: Arnold Building M1 B861
Phone: (206) 667-2793
_______________________________________________
Bioc-devel@r-project.org mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/bioc-devel
