lambdaList: List out of lambda

In michaelquinn32/lambdaList: An R Translation of Steve Losh's List Out of Lambda

Description

The following scripts contains an R version of the classic article List out of Lambda by Steve Losh. The article can be found here, and I strongly recommend reading the article before scanning these functions.

Details

In the following functions, we implement lists without creating an actual data structure. Instead, we use pure functional programming. In the spirit of the article, we also try to use a minimum number of elements in the R language. The focus is in the implementation of the functions, recursion and interesting applications of conditional logic.

This package also contains a variety of functional programming tools to work with these new functional lists. In that regard, it draws heavily on Hadley Wickham's purrr package.

A bit of a caveat: This is just an illustration of functional programming. It overwrites some base function in R, and it abuses the S3 object oriented programming system, which probably wasn't designed to add classes to functions. After all, R has actual objects, so there is never a reason to do this in practice. Nonetheless, it illustrates some of the more interesting aspects of R, which probably excuses the shortcuts it contains.

More than a set of working functions, this exercise is meant to be another realization of Steve's fantastic final recommendation. As he says, "Remember: the point is not to create something that runs well on a physical computer. Instead of thinking about how to make a particular combination of transistors and circuits have the right voltages, think about 'computing' in the beautiful, perfect, abstract sense."

michaelquinn32/lambdaList documentation built on May 22, 2019, 9:52 p.m.