On 07/12/2020 12:26 p.m., luke-tier...@uiowa.edu wrote:
I don't disagree in principle, but the reality is users want shortcuts
and as a result various packages, in particular tidyverse, have been
providing them. Mostly based on formulas, mostly with significant
issues since formulas weren't designed for this, and mostly
incompatible (tidyverse ones are compatible within tidyverse but not
with others). And of course none work in sapply or lapply. Providing a
shorthand in base may help to improve this. You don't have to use it
if you don't want to, and you can establish coding standards that
disallow it if you like.
Here's a suggestion to let people define their own shorthands and work
with the current |> definition.
Define "as.call" as an S3 generic, with a default definition something like
as.call.default <- function(x, f, ...) f(x, ...)
so one could use
x |> as.call(mean)
to get the same result as
x |> mean()
or (if working in the tidyverse)
x |> as.call(~ .x + 1)
to use a method to be provided by rlang or purrr to convert their
shorthand into a call that the pipe can work with.
We already have the generic as.function, which could be used internally
by lapply and sapply for the same sort of purpose. tidyverse has
rlang::as_function, so they could pretty easily add methods for
as.function if they wanted to allow people to use their shorthand in
*apply functions.
Duncan Murdoch
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