While working with sapply, the documentation states that the simplify argument
will yield a vector, matrix etc "when possible". I was curious how the code
actually defined "as possible" and see this within the function
if (!identical(simplify, FALSE) && length(answer))
This seems superfluous to me, in particular this part:
!identical(simplify, FALSE)
The preceding code could be reduced to
if (simplify && length(answer))
and it would not need to execute the call to identical in order to trigger the
conditional execution, which is known from the user's simplify = TRUE or FALSE
inputs. I *think* the extra call to identical is just unnecessary overhead in
this instance.
Take for example, the following toy example code and benchmark results and a
small modification to sapply:
myList <- list(a = rnorm(100), b = rnorm(100))
answer <- lapply(X = myList, FUN = length)
simplify = TRUE
library(microbenchmark)
mySapply <- function (X, FUN, ..., simplify = TRUE, USE.NAMES = TRUE){
FUN <- match.fun(FUN)
answer <- lapply(X = X, FUN = FUN, ...)
if (USE.NAMES && is.character(X) && is.null(names(answer)))
names(answer) <- X
if (simplify && length(answer))
simplify2array(answer, higher = (simplify == "array"))
else answer
}
> microbenchmark(sapply(myList, length), times = 10000L)
Unit: microseconds
expr min lq mean median uq max neval
sapply(myList, length) 14.156 15.572 16.67603 15.926 16.634 650.46 10000
> microbenchmark(mySapply(myList, length), times = 10000L)
Unit: microseconds
expr min lq mean median uq max neval
mySapply(myList, length) 13.095 14.864 16.02964 15.218 15.573 1671.804 10000
My benchmark timings show a timing improvement with only that small change made
and it is seemingly nominal. In my actual work, the sapply function is called
millions of times and this additional overhead propagates to some overall
additional computing time.
I have done some limited testing on various real data to verify that the
objects produced under both variants of the sapply (base R and my modified)
yield identical objects when simply is both TRUE or FALSE.
Perhaps someone else sees a counterexample where my proposed fix does not cause
for sapply to behave as expected.
Harold
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