## 6.4 Functions

Perhaps, keen mathematician that you are, you want to calculate the length of the hypotenuse of a triangle. Dredging up memories of early math classes, you will doubtless recall Pythagoras’s theorem that the hypotenuse (the long side) of triangle is given by:

Let’s say we have a triangle where the shorter sides (a & b) are 3 and 4 units long. Can you calculate the length of side c in R using just the operators from the first section?

Hint #1: The square root is equal to the 0.5 power of a number: 4 ^ 0.5 = 2

Hint #2: Just like in regular math equations, R will calculate some operators before others. For example it will do all multiplications before any additions. However, just like in regular math, we can change the order of operations by wrapping parts of our calculation in parentheses: (...)

Did you get the answer 5? Fantastic!

What’s that? Another complaint? You have to write out this long expression every time you need the hypotenuse of a triangle (no doubt this is a frequent chore in your day-to-day life at Mason)?

Again, there is a solution! R allows us to save pieces of code in variables. Yes, you heard that right: variables don’t just have to store data, they can also store code!

These stored, reusable sections of code are called functions.

For example, you could create a function to calculate the sum of two numbers:

adder <- function(number1, number2) {
result <- number1 + number2
return(result)
}

Entering these 4 lines at the console prompt will be slow and error-prone, so let’s try something different.

Click on the “File” menu at the top of RStudio. Select “New File” and then “R Script”. A blank editor window should appear in a new pane above the console.

Copy the adder function from the previous page into this empty script. Then press “Control + Alt + R” on your keyboard (simultaneously). This will run the contents of your script all at once.

If successful, you should see that adder appears in the Environment pane under a new section called Functions.

How do we use our adder function? Go back to the console, and type something like this:

If your function is working correctly you should get the result of the 2 numbers that you entered inside the braces.

Let’s take another look at the adder function to understand what’s going on:

adder <- function(number1, number2) {
result <- number1 + number2
return(result)
}

Line 1: The first line creates a new function with the function keyword and saves it to the name adder using the assignment operator <-, just as we did for variables.

After function are a pair of parentheses. Inside these, we put a list of the parameters that the function can take, separated by commas. In this case, our adder function has two paramters (the numbers to add together). We are going to give these numbers the temporary names number1 and number2 (creative, I know). We will use these parameter names inside the function to refer to these two numbers.

We end the line with an opening curly bracket { to indicate that the code that follows is part of the function.

Line 2: This is the meat of our adder function. We add our two number paramters together and store them in a variable called result. Its important to note that result only exists inside the curly brackets of the adder function (i.e. it vanishes after the function has finished).

Line 3: Here we specify what the function is should return: in this case we want to return the result variable.

Line 4: We signal the end of the function with a closing curly bracket (matching the one from the end of line 1).

You might object (and not without reason) that our adder function is a very trivial example. Wouldn’t it just be easier to use the + operator?

Yes, it would! So let’s make a more complicated function. Can you convert your Pythagorean code from earlier into a function?

Hint #3: The general format of an R function is:

function_name <- function(argument1, argument2, argument3, ...etc.) {
some code
some more code
…etc.
return(something)
}

Hint #4: Use an R function like this:

> function_name(variable1, 104, ...etc.)

i.e. the function name followed by parentheses containing a comma separated list of data and variables. Using a function is referred to as “calling a function”.