A ‘metric’ is a measure of distance between points in space.
An object of class "metric" represents such a metric,
and supports many geometrical computations that involve
the metric. See metric.object.
The argument task should be the name of an existing function
in the spatstat family representing a geometrical operation, such
as computing pairwise distances, nearest-neighbour distances,
the distance map, and so on. The code will determine whether
this geometrical operation has a counterpart using the specified metric,
that is defined and supported in the object m.
If so, then this operation will be applied to the
data specified in ..., and the result will be returned.
For example, the spatstat function nndist.ppp computes
nearest-neighbour distances using the Euclidean distance metric.
To calculate nearest-neighbour distances for a point pattern X
using another metric m,
use invoke.metric(m, "nndist.ppp", X).
If evaluate=FALSE, the computation is not performed,
and invoke.metric simply returns a function to
perform the desired operation.