> > Providing the ability to write assignment functions that don't duplicate > > is a more urgent problem. > > You mean, for end-users? It can be done via primitives.
Isn't this sort of a run-time optimisation? I thought R generally followed the functional programming model of immutable objects, copy on modification. As a general comment/question - it seems to me the R seems to be moving away from a functional paradigm to be more OO (especially among package developers). > As I said in my reply on R-help, I don't see the original as at all a > common problem. About the only times where a bound on number of entries > is unknown in advance is when reading from a connection (and there the > internal code does uses doubling strategies), and in a iterative procedure > with no limit on the number of iterations (not usually good practice). Agreed - but it is a very common mistake, and this change could bring large performance increases to any written in this way. Of course, you can only protect users from themselves to some extent, and I can imagine many things that would be both more interesting to work on and provide performance benefits for people who understand more about how vectors work. Regards, Hadley ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
