R adds native pipe and lambda syntax

Post by kgwgk » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 10:45 PM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #77

sieste wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The lambda syntax (\(x) -> x + 1) is similar to Haskell's (\x -> x + 1). The proposed lambda syntax for R is `\(x) x+1` so `\` will just be shorthand for `function`.

The anonymous function change is probably a (small) mistake. function(x) {x + 1} is already logically equivalent to and from some perspectives an arguable syntax improvement on \(x) x + 1 Giving everyone two ways of doing one thing just means the tutorials will be fragmented and beginners even more confused. Tierney mentioned that tidyverse found function(x) too verbose and uses fomula syntax. Given how tidyverse oft…

    \(x) x+1

    function(x) x+1

Post by zwaps » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 10:51 PM UTC

Huntsecker wrote: post #24

personally Im surprised R is still in active development when the main use case for people to use R (at least when I was using it) was for statistical analysis. Python with its libraries (a lot I believe ported from R) just does is nicer, and faster.

Post by grayclhn » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 11:00 PM UTC

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #73

cwyers wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, the video helped explain some things, along with this post from the R-devel list: https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2020-December/080173.... The reason for announcing the new lambda syntax at the same time seems to be to enable certain workflows that the magrittr pipe supports. The %>% operator, by default, pipes to the first argument of a function. If you want to pipe to a different argument, you can do…

The use of "." as an argument is actually probably one of my most common wtf's with pipes in general. I tend to use it a lot if I'm just piping a vector to base functions (gsub/grep have x as their third argument. This syntax looks like it makes that a little harder, but the new error messages are going to make everything so much better that I'm totally fine with it.

    lm(y ~ ., data = my_dataframe)

    my_original_dataframe %>%
        do_a_bunch_of_tranformations() %>%
        select(...) %>% # Pull out just the columns you want
        lm(y ~ ., data = .)

Post by grayclhn » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 11:05 PM UTC

wodenokoto wrote: post #14

Kind of odd they didn't decide to go with the magrittr syntax, which is in common use and heavily promoted in dplyr / tidyverse. I wonder if RStudio will change its `ctrl` + `shift` + m shortcut from the magrittr ( %>% ) style pipes to these new pipes ( |> )

Post by saeranv » Sat, Dec 05, 2020, 11:07 PM UTC