Read the help carefully as to what 'copy' means:
When an object is traced any copying of the object by the C
function ‘duplicate’ produces a message to standard output, as
does type coercion and copying when passing arguments to ‘.C’ or
‘.Fortran’.
If you want to understand when 'duplicate' is called, you need to read
the source code. File src/main/subassign.c will explain the different
paths taken by your two cases. But isn't it rather obvious that
duplicating x is not useful when a new longer vector needs to be created?
(BTW, in earlier versions of R tracemem reported some transformations of
x to objects of the same length, but not at all consistently.]
On 12/07/2012 17:15, Hadley Wickham wrote:
Hi all,
I've been trying to get a better handle on what manipulations lead R
to duplicate a vector, creating small experiments and using tracemem
to observe what happens (all in 2.15.1). That's lead me to a few
questions, illustrated using the snippet below.
x <- 1:10
tracemem(x)
# [1] "<0x1058f8238>"
x[5] <- 5
# tracemem[0x1058f8238 -> 0x105994ab0]:
x[11] <- 11
Why does x[5] <- 5 create a copy, when x[11] (which should be
extending a vector does not) ? I can understand that maybe x[5] <- 5
hasn't yet been optimised to not make a copy, but if that's the case
then why doesn't x[11] <- 11 make one? I thought it might be because
somehow tracemem loses track, but adding an additional tracemem(x)
after x[5] <- 5 doesn't change the output.
Hadley
--
Brian D. Ripley, rip...@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595
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