[R] Novice programing question

[jim holtman]

'y' has a default value of NULL, so its value is NULL.  Check ?cov to
see what happens when it is NULL.

On 10/24/07, Ista Zahn <istazahn at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
> I apologize for the ignorance implicit in this question, but I'm
> having a hard time figuring out how R functions work. For example, if
> I wanted to write a function to compute a variance, I would do
> something like
>
>  >my.var <- function(x) (sum(((x-mean(x)))^2))/(length(((x-mean(x)))
> ^2)-1)
>
> And this seems to work, e.g.,
>
>  > my.var(V1)
> [1] 116.1
>  > var(V1)
> [1] 116.1
>
> But when I try to see what the built-in var function does I get
>
>  > var
> function (x, y = NULL, na.rm = FALSE, use)
> {
>     if (missing(use))
>         use <- if (na.rm)
>             "complete.obs"
>         else "all.obs"
>     na.method <- pmatch(use, c("all.obs", "complete.obs",
> "pairwise.complete.obs"))
>     if (is.data.frame(x))
>         x <- as.matrix(x)
>     else stopifnot(is.atomic(x))
>     if (is.data.frame(y))
>         y <- as.matrix(y)
>     else stopifnot(is.atomic(y))
>     .Internal(cov(x, y, na.method, FALSE))
> }
> <environment: namespace:stats>
>
> Being a novice, I can't understand what this means. I only have one
> variable, yet the code seems to be based on the covariance between x
> and y. What is y? Sorry for such a stupid question. I am just trying
> to figure out how R does things, and I can't seem to get my head
> around it. Thank you for your patience.
>
> -Ista Zahn
> http://izahn.homedns.org
>
> ______________________________________________
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> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>


-- 
Jim Holtman
Cincinnati, OH
+1 513 646 9390

What is the problem you are trying to solve?