The R language has a nifty feature for defining functions that can take a variable number of arguments. For example, the function data.frame takes any number of arguments, and each argument becomes the data for a column in the resulting data table. Example usage:

> data.frame(letters=c("a", "b", "c"), numbers=c(1,2,3), notes=c("do", "re", "mi"))
  letters numbers notes
1       a       1    do
2       b       2    re
3       c       3    mi

The function's signature includes an ellipsis, like this:

function (..., row.names = NULL, check.rows = FALSE, check.names = TRUE, 
    stringsAsFactors = default.stringsAsFactors()) 
{
    [FUNCTION DEFINITION HERE]
}

I would like to write a function that does something similar, taking multiple values and consolidating them into a single return value (as well as doing some other processing). In order to do this, I need to figure out how to "unpack" the ... from the function's arguments within the function. I don't know how to do this. The relevant line in the function definition of data.frame is object <- as.list(substitute(list(...)))[-1L], which I can't make any sense of.

So how can I convert the ellipsis from the function's signature into, for example, a list?

To be more specific, how can I write get_list_from_ellipsis in the code below?

my_ellipsis_function(...) {
    input_list <- get.list.from.ellipsis(...)
    output_list <- lapply(X=input_list, FUN=do_something_interesting)
    return(output_list)
}

my_ellipsis_function(a=1:10,b=11:20,c=21:30)