[r] R : how to simply repeat a command?

I'm trying to repeat this simple command 10,000 times (via a simple and easy solution):

Tandem <- sample(OUT, size = 815, replace = TRUE, prob = NULL); mean(Tandem) 

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

You could use replicate or sapply:

R> colMeans(replicate(10000, sample(100, size=815, replace=TRUE, prob=NULL))) R> sapply(seq_len(10000), function(...) mean(sample(100, size=815, replace=TRUE, prob=NULL))) 

replicate is a wrapper for the common use of sapply for repeated evaluation of an expression (which will usually involve random number generation).

It's not clear whether you're asking this because you are new to programming, but if that's the case then you should probably read this article on loops and indeed read some basic materials on programming.

If you already know about control structures and you want the R-specific implementation details then there are dozens of tutorials around, such as this one. The other answer uses replicate and colMeans, which is idiomatic when writing in R and probably blazing fast as well, which is important if you want 10,000 iterations.

However, one more general and (for beginners) straightforward way to approach problems of this sort would be to use a for loop.

> for (ii in 1:5) { + print(ii) + } [1] 1 [1] 2 [1] 3 [1] 4 [1] 5 > 

So in your case, if you just wanted to print the mean of your Tandem object 5 times:

for (ii in 1:5) {     Tandem <- sample(OUT, size = 815, replace = TRUE, prob = NULL)     TandemMean <- mean(Tandem)     print(TandemMean) } 

As mentioned above, replicate is a more natural way to deal with this specific problem using R. Either way, if you want to store the results - which is surely the case - you'll need to start thinking about data structures like vectors and lists. Once you store something you'll need to be able to access it to use it in future, so a little knowledge is vital.

set.seed(1234) OUT <- runif(100000, 1, 2) tandem <- list() for (ii in 1:10000) {     tandem[[ii]] <- mean(sample(OUT, size = 815, replace = TRUE, prob = NULL)) }  tandem[1] tandem[100] tandem[20:25] 

...creates this output:

> set.seed(1234) > OUT <- runif(100000, 1, 2) > tandem <- list() > for (ii in 1:10000) { +     tandem[[ii]] <- mean(sample(OUT, size = 815, replace = TRUE, prob = NULL)) + } >  > tandem[1] [[1]] [1] 1.511923  > tandem[100] [[1]] [1] 1.496777  > tandem[20:25] [[1]] [1] 1.500669  [[2]] [1] 1.487552  [[3]] [1] 1.503409  [[4]] [1] 1.501362  [[5]] [1] 1.499728  [[6]] [1] 1.492798  >