Apr 4, 2018
x[idxs + 1] or x[idxs + 1L]? That is the question.
Assume that we have a vector $x$ of $n = 100,000$ random values, e.g.
> n <- 100000 > x <- rnorm(n) and that we wish to calculate the $n-1$ first-order differences $y=(y_1, y_2, …, y_{n-1})$ where $y_i=x_{i+1} - x_i$. In R, we can calculate this using the following vectorized form:
> idxs <- seq_len(n - 1) > y <- x[idxs + 1] - x[idxs] We can certainly do better if we turn to native code, but is there a more efficient way to implement this using plain R code?
