R already has anonymous functions. Just write function(x) do_someting and you’re done. This post is for all of us who are not satisified with this solution. For one, it’s exhausting to write to long function(x) instead of, say, L(x), but that’s not all of it!

Take the following example, a calculation of the maximum likelihood estimate of a gamma distribution:

set.seed(313)
x = rgamma(100, 2, 4)
nlm(f = function(p) -mean(dgamma(x, shape = p[1], rate = p[2], log = TRUE)),
p = c(1, 1))$estimate ## [1] 2.138694 4.223359 Here the hassle is to keep track of the indices of p, which is not even needed as a variable name. The function argument of nlm works perfectly well with no named arguments! In this post I will introduce the L-function, which allows you to write the previous function call like this: nlm(f = L(-mean(dgamma(x, shape = ?1, rate = ?2, log = TRUE))), p = c(1, 1)) The function created by L doesn’t have any named arguments, but you can refer to the unnamed arguments by the question mark. Actually, the function f above is equivalent to the following, just with some syntactic sugar on top. function(...) -mean(dgamma(x, ...[[1]], ...[[2]], log = TRUE))) This works in the nlm case since whenever f has the signature ... and receives a vector, it interprets this as do.call over the vector: f = function(...) ...[[1]] f(c(1, 2, 3)) ## [1] 1 The consequence is that functions that depend on vectorization (e.g. integrate) won’t work together with L. ### The L function call_replace = function(call) { if(length(call) > 1) { if(call[[1]] == quote(?)) if(is.numeric(call[[2]])) return(parse(text = paste0("...[[", eval(call[[2]]), "]]"))[[1]]) new = as.call(lapply(1:length(call), function(i) call_replace(call[[i]]))) names(new) = names(call) new } else call } L = function(call, quoted = FALSE) { call = if(!quoted) substitute(call) else call f = function(...) NULL body(f) = call_replace(call) environment(f) = parent.frame() f } What does it do? First, call_replace travels recursively through the call and replaces any instance of ?n with ...[[n]]. The L constructs a function from the modified call. ### Using magrittr It’s also possible to make a piped version of this: library("magrittr") %L>% = function(lhs, rhs) { lhs_call = call(name = "function", quote(function(...) {})[[2]], call_replace(substitute(lhs))) rhs_call = substitute(rhs) eval(call("%>%", lhs_call, rhs_call)) } -mean(dgamma(x, shape = ?1, rate = ?2, log = TRUE)) %L>% nlm(p = c(1, 1)) %$%
estimate
## [1] 2.138694 4.223359

This piped version won’t work if it is placed in the middle of a magrittr pipe. Take this example:

rgamma(100, 2, 7) %>%
-mean(dgamma(shape = ?1, rate = ?2, log = TRUE)) %L>%
nlm(p = c(1, 1))
## Error in dgamma(shape = ...[[1]], rate = ...[[2]], log = TRUE): argument "x" is missing, with no default

### Ideas to modify L

We could use !n to reference the $$n$$th argument of the created function. Moreover, they could be named and given default values. The propotype L(f(a = !1 == b <- c, 1, 2, 3)) will return a function of one argument named b with default value c.