Concatenate trajectories

[Enchufa2]

A new verb is needed (for instance, include) so the following:

t.common <- create_trajectory("common") %>%
  seize("receptionist", 1) %>% #Both dogs and cats go to the receptionist
  timeout(function() max(0,rnorm(1,5,2))) %>%
  release("receptionist", 1)

t.cat <- create_trajectory("cat") %>%
  include(t.common) %>%
  seize("catDoc", 1) %>%
  timeout(function() max(0,rnorm(1,30,10))) %>%
  release("catDoc", 1)

t.dog <- create_trajectory("dog") %>%
  include(t.common) %>%
  seize("dogDoc", 1) %>%
  timeout(function() max(0,rnorm(1,30,10))) %>%
  release("dogDoc", 1)

should be equivalent to this:

t.cat <- create_trajectory("cat") %>%
  seize("receptionist", 1) %>% #Both dogs and cats go to the receptionist
  timeout(function() max(0,rnorm(1,5,2))) %>%
  release("receptionist", 1) %>%
  seize("catDoc", 1) %>%
  timeout(function() max(0,rnorm(1,30,10))) %>%
  release("catDoc", 1)

t.dog <- create_trajectory("dog") %>%
  seize("receptionist", 1) %>% #Both dogs and cats go to the receptionist
  timeout(function() max(0,rnorm(1,5,2))) %>%
  release("receptionist", 1) %>%
  seize("dogDoc", 1) %>%
  timeout(function() max(0,rnorm(1,30,10))) %>%
  release("dogDoc", 1)

[Enchufa2]

Also, the verb should be intuitive alone, because we may want to do the following:

t0 <- ...
t1 <- ...
t2 <- ...

t3 <- concatenate(t0, t1, t2)

And include doesn't seem very intuitive in this context. We may also look for similar operations in other packages and their names. For instance, I got this:

?? concatenate

base::cat               Concatenate and Print
base::paste             Concatenate Strings
crayon::%+%             Concatenate character vectors
grid::gPath             Concatenate Grob Names
grid::vpPath            Concatenate Viewport Names
igraph::c.igraph.es     Concatenate edge sequences
igraph::c.igraph.vs     Concatenate vertex sequences
NMF::c,NMF-method       Concatenating NMF Models
stringi::%s+%           Concatenate Two Character Vectors
stringi::stri_c         Concatenate Character Vectors
stringr::str_dup        Duplicate and concatenate strings within a
                        character vector.

It seems there is no agreement on this. 😄

[bart6114]

What about join_trajectories(...) where ... can be any number of trajectories?

[Enchufa2]

It's a good option. I would prefer something shorter, but it's difficult to be intuitive, cross-compatible with other packages and also concise.

[Enchufa2]

What about simply "join" (only present in plyr, which should be replace by dplyr, or "tjoin" to avoid the overlapping), "blend", "bind" (or "tbind", to mimic "rbind" and "cbind"), "connect", "link", "plug", "tie"...?

[bart6114]

join is perfect imo; from the syntax it should be clear that we're not calling join to join data.frames (plyr). we're using it in the definition stage of a trajectory. seems nice and concise 😀