if-else vs ifelse with lists

Question

Why do the if-else construct and the function ifelse() behave differently?

mylist <- list(list(a=1, b=2), list(x=10, y=20))

l1 <- ifelse(sum(sapply(my         


        

Answer 1

For some reason this is marked as a duplicate of Why does ifelse() return single-value output?

So a work around for that question is:

a=3
yo <- ifelse(a==1, 1, list(c(1,2)))
yo[[1]]