Advanced R

11

Functionals

“To become significantly more reliable, code must become more transparent. In particular, nested conditions and loops must be viewed with great suspicion. Complicated control flows confuse programmers. Messy code often hides bugs.” — Bjarne Stroustrup

A higher-order function is a function that takes a function as an input or returns a function as output. We’ve already seen one type of higher order function: closures, functions returned by another function. The complement to a closure is a functional, a function that takes a function as an input and returns a vector as output. Here’s a simple functional: it calls the function provided as input with 1000 random uniform numbers.

randomise <- function(f) f(runif(1e3))

randomise(mean) ...