Hi Severin, I'm not sure what the best practice is, but since your anonymous function is defined inside your main function, you don't need to supply it with all those arguments. This should also work, because R has lexical scoping:
main_function <- function(alot, of, paramters) { var01 <- foo ... varXX <- bar data_list <- list(data01, data02, data03, ... , dataYY) lapply( seq_along(data_list), function(i) { stuff helper_function(var01, ... , varXX) } } This is already a bit shorter. I hope this helps, Freek On 16/04/2021, 13:45, "Bioc-devel on behalf of Severin Bang" <bioc-devel-boun...@r-project.org on behalf of severin.b...@physik.uni-freiburg.de> wrote: Dear community, I am writing my first package with the aim to publish it on Bioconductor. To structure the code and make it (human) readable I have defined some helper functions, that will not be exported. The main function (which will be user available) makes some data structuring, defines some variables and will then call a helper function in a lapply-call on a list of data.frames. Now I find myself passing >>10 arguments (basically everything that was defined in the main function before the lapply call) to the helper function when executed by lapply. All arguments (except the index of the current data.frame from the list which is lapplyd over) are static for all the runs. My question is now: What is considered best practice in this case? should I put all parameters in a list? Is there a way to pass the whole "parent" environment (the locale of the main function) to lapply, or should I keep all the single parameters? Maybe a "pseudo code" example is useful; this is how my problem is structured: main_function <- function(alot, of, paramters) { var01 <- foo ... varXX <- bar data_list <- list(data01, data02, data03, ... , dataYY) lapply( seq_along(data_list), function( i, var01, ... varXX ) { stuff helper_function(var01, ... , varXX) }, var01 = var01, ... varXX = varXX ) } Thank you very much! Best, Severin _______________________________________________ Bioc-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/bioc-devel _______________________________________________ Bioc-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/bioc-devel