Here's a basic question that doesn't seem to be completely answered in the docs, and which unfortunately I've not had time to figure out by wading through the R source code:
In a vector (or array) element assignment such as z[3] <- 8 is there in actuality a full rewriting of the entire vector pointed to by z, as implied by z <- "[<-"(z,3,value=8) Assume that an element of z has already being changed previously, so that copy-on-change issues don't apply, with z being reassigned back to the same memory address. I seem to recall reading somewhere that recent R versions make some attempt to avoid rewriting the entire vector, and my timing experiments seem to suggest that it's true. So, is a full rewrite avoided? And where in the source code is this done? Thanks. Norm Matloff ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
