Idle thoughts lead to R internals: how to count function arguments

“Some R functions have an awful lot of arguments”, you think to yourself. “I wonder which has the most?” It’s not an original thought: the same question as applied to the R base package is an exercise in the Functions chapter of the excellent Advanced R. Much of the information in this post came from there. There are lots of R packages. We’ll limit ourselves to those packages which ship with R, and which load on startup. Which ones are they? What packages load on starting R? Start a new R session and type search(). Here’s the result on my machine: search() [1] ".GlobalEnv" "tools:rstudio" "package:stats" "package:graphics" "package:grDevices" "package:utils" "package:datasets" "package:methods" "Autoloads" "package:base" We’re interested in the packages with priority = base. Next question: How can I see and filter for package priority? You don’t need dplyr for this, but it helps. library(tidyverse) installed.packages() %>% as.tibble() %>% filter(Priority == "base") %>% select(Package, Priority) # A tibble: 14 x 2 Package Priority <chr> <chr> 1 base base 2 compiler base 3 datasets base 4 graphics base 5 grDevices base 6 grid base 7 methods base 8 parallel base 9 splines base 10 stats base 11 stats4 base 12 tcltk base 13 tools base 14 utils base Comparing to the output from search...
Source: What You're Doing Is Rather Desperate - Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Tags: R statistics Source Type: blogs