Generating all distinct permutations of a list in R

A while back I had to do this in base R without loading any packages.

permutations <- function(n){
    if(n==1){
        return(matrix(1))
    } else {
        sp <- permutations(n-1)
        p <- nrow(sp)
        A <- matrix(nrow=n*p,ncol=n)
        for(i in 1:n){
            A[(i-1)*p+1:p,] <- cbind(i,sp+(sp>=i))
        }
        return(A)
    }
}

Usage:

> matrix(letters[permutations(3)],ncol=3)
     [,1] [,2] [,3]
[1,] "a"  "b"  "c" 
[2,] "a"  "c"  "b" 
[3,] "b"  "a"  "c" 
[4,] "b"  "c"  "a" 
[5,] "c"  "a"  "b" 
[6,] "c"  "b"  "a"