Further delving into the mysteries of R evaluation...This is closely related to my previous question ( How to write an R function that evaluates an expression within a data-
You can use three dots to gather arguments and pass them to another function, is that what you mean?
ftop=function(...) f(...) f=function(a,b) a[b] a=data.frame(b=10) ftop(a,"b") f(a,"b")