More on Macros in R

Recently ran into something interesting in the R macros/quasi-quotation/substitution/syntax front:

It appears !! is no longer the last word in substitution (it certainly wasn’t the first).

The described effect is actually already pretty easy to achieve in R.

suppressPackageStartupMessages(library("dplyr"))

group_by <- wrapr::bquote_function(group_by)
summarize <- wrapr::bquote_function(summarize)

my_average <- function(data, grp_var, avg_var) {
  data %>%
    group_by(.( grp_var )) %>%
    summarize(avg = mean(.( avg_var ), na.rm = TRUE))
}

data <- data.frame(x = 1:10, g = rep(c(0,1), 5))

my_average(data, as.name("g"), as.name("x"))

## # A tibble: 2 x 2
##       g   avg
##   <dbl> <dbl>
## 1     0     5
## 2     1     6

Or if you don’t want to perform the quoting by hand.

my_average <- function(data, grp_var, avg_var,
                       grp_var_name = substitute(grp_var),
                       avg_var_name = substitute(avg_var)
                       ) {
  data %>%
    group_by(.( grp_var_name )) %>%
    summarize(avg = mean(.( avg_var_name ), na.rm = TRUE))
}

my_average(data, g, x)

## # A tibble: 2 x 2
##       g   avg
##   <dbl> <dbl>
## 1     0     5
## 2     1     6

And we can use the same Thomas Lumley / bquote() notation for string interpolation.

group_var <- as.name("g")
avg_var <- as.name("x")

wrapr::sinterp("group_var was .(group_var), and avg_var was .(avg_var)")

# [1] "group_var was g, and avg_var was x"

The .() notation has a great history in R and has been used by data.table for years.