What's the difference between lapply and do.call?

Question

I\'m learning R recently and confused by two function: lapplyand do.call. It seems that they\'re just similar to map function in Lisp.

Answer 1

lapply() is a map-like function. do.call() is different. It is used for passing the arguments to a function in list form instead of having them enumerated. For instance,

> do.call("+",list(4,5))
[1] 9