R in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Functions as Arguments

Many functions in R can take other functions as arguments. For example, many modeling functions accept an optional argument that specifies how to handle missing values; this argument is usually a function for processing the input data.

As an example of a function that takes another function as an argument, let’s look at sapply. The sapply function iterates through each element in a vector, applying another function to each element in the vector and returning the results. Here is a simple example:

> a <- 1:7
> sapply(a, sqrt)
[1] 1.000000 1.414214 1.732051 2.000000 2.236068 2.449490 2.645751

This is a toy example; you could have calculated the same quantity with the expression sqrt(1:7). However, there are many useful functions that don’t work properly on a vector with more than one element; sapply provides a simple way to extend such a function to work on a vector. Related functions allow you to summarize every element in a data structure or to perform more complicated calculations. See Summarizing Functions for information on related functions.

Anonymous Functions

So far, we’ve mostly seen named functions in R. However, because functions are just objects in R, it is possible to create functions that do not have names. These are called anonymous functions. Anonymous functions are usually passed as arguments to other functions. If you’re new to functional languages, this concept might seem strange, so let’s start with a very simple example.

We will define a function ...