[R] dopar parallel assignments

[Steve Lianoglou]

Hi Vivek,

On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 8:37 PM, Vivek Ayer <vivek.ayer at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi David,
>
> Thanks for the help. It's working! I still find it to be a new
> concept. I haven't encountered storing loops in objects in any other
> languages. Can it even be done in other languages? Very novel, quite
> intriguing.

Yes, this idiom is quite frequently used in "functional" languages.
You're not actually storing loops in objects, per se, though.

Its somehow analogous to the "map" function, where you're traversing
an input list of things/objects, and creating a new list of objects by
transforming them. If you're familiar with python, think "list
comprehensions".


In your use case, your "inputs" are just sequence/index numbers, so
it's not as natural to think of them this way, but imagine something
like this:

words <- c('one', 'two', 'three')
capitalized <- for (word=words) %do% someCapitalizeFunction(word)

which might give you c("One", "Two", "Three")

This is just a pedagogical example, of course, but hopefully it helps
to clear things up a bit? You're not storing loops in objects, but
rather storing the transformed objects from your input list into a new
list.

-steve

-- 
Steve Lianoglou
Graduate Student: Computational Systems Biology
 | Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
 | Weill Medical College of Cornell University
Contact Info: http://cbio.mskcc.org/~lianos/contact