It is usually said, that for– and while-loops should be avoided in R. I was curious about just how the different alternatives compare in terms of speed. The first loop is perhaps the worst I can think of – the return vector is initialized without type and length so that the ...

In my daily work I often have to transform a long table to a wide matrix so accommodate some function. At some stage in my life I came across the reshape2 package, and I have been with that philosophy ever since – I find it makes data wrangling easy and straight ...