R: Versions of 'cbind' and 'rbind' recursively built on...

cBind {Matrix} | R Documentation

## Versions of 'cbind' and 'rbind' recursively built on cbind2/rbind2

### Description

The base functions `cbind` and `rbind` are defined for an arbitrary number of arguments and hence have the first formal argument `...`. For that reason, in the past S4 methods could easily be defined for binding together matrices inheriting from `Matrix`.

For that reason, `cbind2` and `rbind2` have been provided for binding together two matrices, and we have defined methods for these and the `'Matrix'`-matrices.

Before R version 3.2.0 (April 2015), we have needed a substitute for S4-enabled versions of `cbind` and `rbind`, and provided `cBind` and `rBind` with identical syntax and semantic in order to bind together multiple matrices (`"matrix"` or `"Matrix"` and vectors. With R version 3.2.0 and newer, `cBind` and `rBind` are deprecated and produce a deprecation warning (via `.Deprecated`), and your code should start using `cbind()` and `rbind()` instead.

### Usage

    cBind(..., deparse.level = 1)
    rBind(..., deparse.level = 1)

### Arguments

`...` | matrix-like R objects to be bound together, see `cbind` and `rbind`.
`deparse.level` | integer determining under which circumstances column and row names are built from the actual arguments' ‘expression’, see `cbind`.

### Details

The implementation of these is recursive, calling `cbind2` or `rbind2` respectively, where these have methods defined and so should dispatch appropriately.

### Value

typically a ‘matrix-like’ object of a similar `class` as the first argument in `...`.

Note that sometimes by default, the result is a `sparseMatrix` if one of the arguments is (even in the case where this is not efficient). In other cases, the result is chosen to be sparse when there are more zero entries is than non-zero ones (as the default `sparse` in `Matrix()`).

### Author(s)

Martin Maechler

### See Also

`cbind2`, `cbind`, Documentation in base R's methods package .

### Examples

    (a <- matrix(c(2:1,1:2), 2,2))
    D <- Diagonal(2)
    if(getRversion() < "3.2.0") {
     M1 <- cbind(0, rBind(a, 7))
     print(M1) # remains traditional matrix

     M2 <- cBind(4, a, D, -1, D, 0) # a sparse Matrix
     print(M2)

    } else { ## newer versions of R do not need cBind / rBind:

     M1 <- cbind(0, suppressWarnings(rBind(a, 7)))
     print(M1) # remains traditional matrix

     M2 <- suppressWarnings(cBind(4, a, D, -1, D, 0)) # a sparse Matrix
     print(M2)

     stopifnot(identical(M1, cbind(0, rbind(a, 7))),
               identical(M2, cbind(4, a, D, -1, D, 0)))
    }# R >= 3.2.0

[Package Matrix version 1.2-12 Index]