Using “…” and “replicate”

Question

In the documentation of sapply and replicate there is a warning regarding using ...

Now, I can accept it as such, but would li

Answer 1

?replicate, in the Examples section, tells us explicitly that what you are trying to do does not and will not work. In the Note section of ?replicate we have:

     If ‘expr’ is a function call, be aware of assumptions about where
     it is evaluated, and in particular what ‘...’ might refer to.  You
     can pass additional named arguments to a function call as
     additional named arguments to ‘replicate’: see ‘Examples’.

And if we look at Examples, we see:

 ## use of replicate() with parameters:
 foo <- function(x=1, y=2) c(x,y)
 # does not work: bar <- function(n, ...) replicate(n, foo(...))
 bar <- function(n, x) replicate(n, foo(x=x))
 bar(5, x=3)

My reading of the docs is that they do far more than warn you about using ... in replicate() calls; they explicitly document that it does not work. Much of the discussion in that help file relates to the ... argument of the other functions, not necessarily to replicate().