R Programming By Example

Functions as arguments

Sometimes when you want to generalize functions, you may want to plug in a certain functionality into a function. You can do that in various ways. For example, you may use conditionals, as we will see in the following section in this chapter, to provide them with different functionality based on context. However, conditional should be avoided when possible because they can introduce unnecessary complexity into our code. A better solution would be to pass a function as a parameter which will be called when appropriate, and if we want to change how a function behaves, we can change the function we're passing through for a specific task.

That may sound complicated, but in reality, it's very simple. Let's start by creating ...