On Wed, 26 Jul 2006, Rossi, Peter E. wrote:
>
> Writing R Ext says to treat R objects that are arguments to .Call as
> read only (i.e. don't modify).
>
> I have a long list of lists that and I want to avoid the overhead of a
> copy in my C code. I would just like to modify some of the elements
> of list by replacing them with elements of exactly the same size/type.
>
> below is an example of the essence of the problem. This seems to work.
> Is this dangerous or ok? (of course, I want to do something more
> complicated
> since I can do this in R, but I hope this illustrates my question).
It is dangerous.
If you do
lst1<-list("a","b","c")
lst2<-lst1
element<-"d"
.Call("modlist",lst1, 1, element)
then both lst1 and lst2 will change. The danger is just that you can
break the call-by-value illusion that R maintains, in two ways. The first
is that objects that have shared structure can be modified, the
second is that you can create shared structure without R knowing: if you
change "element" subsequently then lst1 and lst2 may change.
-thomas
>
> SEXP modlist(SEXP list, SEXP ind, SEXP element){
> int index;
> index=INTEGER_VALUE(ind);
> SET_ELEMENT(list,index,element);
> return(ind);
> }
>
> called in R as in
>
> lst=list("a","b","c")
> element="d"
> out=.Call("modlist",lst,1,element)
>
> here the .Call is used just for its effect on lst.
>
> thanks!
>
> peter
>
>
> ................................
> Peter E. Rossi
> Joseph T. and Bernice S. Lewis Professor of Marketing and Statistics
> Editor, Quantitative Marketing and Economics
> Rm 353, Graduate School of Business, U of Chicago
> 5807 S. Woodlawn Ave, Chicago IL 60637, USA
> Tel: (773) 702-7513 | Fax: (773) 834-2081
>
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>
Thomas Lumley Assoc. Professor, Biostatistics
[EMAIL PROTECTED] University of Washington, Seattle
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