This is an R package that provides a streamlined, standard
evaluation-based approach to function composition. Using
fc
, a sequence of functions can be composed together such
that returned objects from composed functions are used as intermediate
values directly passed to the next function.
To install this package in R, you can install it via the
devtools
package:
devtools::install_github("swang87/fc")
The package can then be loaded using:
library(fc)
The workhorse of the package is the fc()
function. Its
first argument is either a named function or an anonymous function;
subsequent arguments must be named arguments of this function.
We can create a new function that uses partial function valuation to display the first 50 rows of a dataset with:
head50 <- fc(head, n=50)
The return function has a single argument x
, inherited
from the head()
function. The function
head50()
consists of:
function (x)
{
head(x, n = 50)
}
In order to perform function composition, multiple fc()
calls could be used in a nested manner:
summary50 <- fc(summary, object=fc(head, n = 50)(object))
The pipe-forward operator %>%
is also supported for
defining a pipeline functions to be run from left-to-right. Note
differences in usage compared to magrittr
and other
packages in the Tidyverse.
summary50 <- fc(head, n=50) %>% summary
In particular, the pipe-forward operator supported by fc
cannot accept a data object on its lefthand side. If one wishes to run
the composed function on a data object without intermediate storage of
the function itself, the following syntax is permissible:
(fc(head, n=50) %>% summary)(x)
log_sqrt_fc_pipe <- fc(log, x=x) %>% fc(sqrt, x=x)
This function takes the square root of the log of an input argument
x
.
get_sepal2_pipe <- fc(function(x, cols) {x[sample(1:nrow(x)), cols]},
cols = grep("Sepal", colnames(x))) %>%
fc(head, n = 10) %>% summary
More details can be found in our working paper.