Hi guys,

So it looks like Herve? added some nice new coercions from list to various
AtomicList types. These delegate to the constructors. I noticed that the
constructors perform the coercion, but they also preserve names (on each
element). This is different from the base R coercions, which drop the
names. Probably being too picky. Also, these are not pure coercions, but in
some ways a "promotion" to list from List. So that's fine with me. I think
we could probably add a coercion from "list" to the base list (not
compressed or simple). For example,  CharacterList would be an alias for
the CompressedCharacterList coercion.

A related question though: what about coercions from a generic AtomicList
to each of the specific types. We do not have those, but they would be
useful. Would those need to drop their names? Consistency is not the only
concern: it would be faster not to preserve them.

As an aside, it is currently very slow to construct a long e.g.
CharacterList, because of the lapply() performing the coercion. There are
obviously faster ways, especially if we do not care about the names.

Michael

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