[R] Accessing sub diagonals / spdiag in R ?

Hello, I'm attempting to access a specific number of sub diagonals in a MATRIX and have been accustomed to using spdiags in MATLAB or Octave. I've got a solution pieced together using for loops and it works though isn't vectorized and liable to run very slow for large matrices. As an example: A =

[R] R - Vectorization and Functional Programming Constructs

Hello, I am new to R (coming from Perl) and have what is, at least at this point, a philosophical question and a request for comment on some basic code. As I understand it - R emphasizes ,or at least supports, the functional programming model. I've come across some code that was markedly absent in