R Data Structures and Algorithms

First class functions in R

R is primarily a functional language at its core. In R, functions are treated just like any other data types, and are considered as first-class citizens. The following example shows that R considers everything as a function call.

Here, the operator + is a function in itself:

> 10+20
[1] 30
> "+"(10,20)
[1] 30

Here, the operator ^ is also a function in itself:

> 4^2
[1] 16
> "^"(4,2)
[1] 16

Now, let's dive deep into functional concepts, which are crucial and widely used by R programmers.

Vectorized functions are among the most popular functional concepts which enable the programmer to execute functions at an individual element level for a given vector. This vector can also be a part of dataframe, matrix, or a list. Let's ...