returning a list in R and functional programming behavior - r

Question

I have a basic questions regarding functional programming in R.
Given a function that returns a list, such as:
myF <- function(x){
return (list(a=11,b=x))
}
why is it that the list returned when calling the function with a range or vector is always the same lenght for 'a'
Ex:
myF(1:10)
returns:
$a
[1] 11
$b
[1] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
How can one change the behavior so that the 'a' list has the sample length as b's.
I am actually working with a bunch of S4 objects that do I cannot easily convert to list (using as.list) so _apply is not my first choice.
Thanks for any insight or help!
EDIT (Added further explanations)
I am not necessarily looking to just pad 'a' to makes its length equal to b's. However using the solution
as.list(data.frame(a=myA,b=x)) pads the 'a' with the same value computed first.
myF <- function(x){
myA = ceiling(runif(1, max=100))
return (as.list(data.frame(a=myA
,b=x)))
}
myF(1:5)
$a
[1] 79 79 79 79 79 79 79 79 79 79
$b
[1] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
I still am not sure why that happens!
Thanks

Answer 1

are you just looking to have 11 repeated so that a is the same length as b? if so:
> myF <- function(x){
+ return (list(a=rep(11,length(x)),b=x))
+ }
> myF(1:10)
$a
[1] 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11
$b
[1] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
EDIT based on OP's clarification/comments. If you want 'a' to instead be a random vector with length equal to 'b':
> myF <- function(x){
+ return (list(a=ceiling(runif(length(x),max=100)),b=x))
+ }
> myF(1:10)
$a
[1] 4 31 8 45 25 74 36 95 64 32
$b
[1] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Answer 2

I don't quite understand what you mean by not being able to use as.list. You should be able to get a version of your function satisfying the requirement that all components of the list be equally long by doing:
myF <- function(x){
return as.list(data.frame(a=11,b=x))
}
EDIT:
The reason list does not work the way you expect is that list applied to a number of lists/vectors/e.t.c. is just that, a list of those lists/vectors/e.t.c.; it does not "inspect" their structure.
What I think you want is the additional semantics that the vectors contained in the list should match up and produce a set of "rows", each with one corresponding element from each one of your vectors. This is exactly what a data frame is suppose to be (indeed how, I think, a data frame is represented in R). The final as.list call does little but change what type its tagged as.
EDIT2:
Note that if I'm wrong above (and that's not the general behaviour you want) then Mac's solution is more appropriate, as it gives you exactly the behaviour that both the vectors should have the same length, without implying that they should "line up".
This would both be confusing to anyone reading the code (as using a data.frame implies you think of your vectors as matching up) as well as forcing any additional elements you add to the list to be converted into vectors of the appropriate length (which may or may not be what you want)

Answer 3

In case I did not understand you correctly last time, here is another possibility:
If you want to generate a second vector, given some function/expression, of the same length as your argument you could do something like:
myF <- function(x){
return (list(a=replicate(length(x),f),b=x))
}
in your example f could be runif(1, max=100), though in the specific case of runif you could explicitly tell it to generate a vector of appropriate length by calling runif(length(x), max=100) inside the function.
replicate simply re-evaluates f the number of times you request, and gives you the vector of all the results.

Answer 4

It appears that your function is "hard coding" a. So no matter what you specify it will always give 11.
If for example you changed the function to:
myF <- function(x){ return (list(a=x,b=x)) }
myF(1:10)
$a
[1] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
$b
[1] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
a is allowed to change like b.
or
myF <- function(x,y){ return (list(a=y,b=x)) }
myF(10:1,1:10)
$a
[1] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
$b
[1] 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Now a is allowed to change independent of b.