This is an "I was just wondering" question. When the package "dataframe" was announced, the author claimed to reduce the number of times a data frame was copied, I started to wonder if I should care about this in my projects. Has anybody written a general guide for how to write R code that doesn't needlessly exhaust RAM?
In Objective-C, we used to gain some considerable advantages by avoiding declaring objects separately, using anonymous variable instead. The storage was allocated on the stack, I think, and I think there was talk that the numbers might stay 'closer' to the CPU (register?) for immediate usage. Does this benefit in R as well? For example, instead of the way I would usually do this: mf <- model.frame(model) y <- model.response(mf) Here is the anonymous alternative, mf is never declared y <- model.response(model.frame(model)) On the face of it, I can imagine this might be better because no permanent thing "mf" is created, the garbage collector wouldn't be called into play if all the data is local and disappears immediately. But, then again, R is doing lots of stuff "under the hood" that I've never bothered to learn about. pj -- Paul E. Johnson Professor, Political Science Assoc. Director 1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504 Center for Research Methods University of Kansas University of Kansas http://pj.freefaculty.org http://quant.ku.edu ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
