distToNearest return object might be better as a vector

[Jason Vander Heiden]

It'd probably be a little cleaner (quicker, more memory efficient, more modular) to return a vector (just the distance column) from distToNearest instead of a copy of the entire data.frame.

[Jason Vander Heiden]

Optional argument added to return distance as a vector. Found that returning the whole data.frame was very useful for ddply operations.