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Functional programming
R, at its heart, is a functional programming (FP) language. This means that it provides many tools for the creation and manipulation of functions. In particular, R has what’s known as first class functions. You can do anything with functions that you can do with vectors: you can assign them to variables, store them in lists, pass them as arguments to other functions, create them inside functions, and even return them as the result of a function.
The chapter starts by showing a motivating example, removing redundancy and duplication in code used to clean and summarise data. Then you’ll learn about the three building blocks of functional programming: anonymous functions, closures (functions written by functions), and lists ...
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