Representation of data in libraries

[Douglas Bates]

At present the example data sets in R libraries are to be given as
expressions that can be read directly into R.  For example, the acid.R 
file in the main library looks like
 acid <- data.frame(
  carb  = c(0.1, 0.3, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.9),
  optden = c(0.086, 0.269, 0.446, 0.538, 0.626, 0.782), row.names = paste(1:6))

This is great when you have only a few observations.  I have one
example data set with over 9000 rows and 17 variables.  Even when I
set -v 40, I exhaust the available memory trying to read it in as a
data.frame.  I believe this is because of the recursive nature of the
parsing of data objects.

Are there alternatives that would cause less memory usage?  In
S/S-PLUS the data.dump/data.restore functions use a portable
representation that can be parsed without exponential memory growth.
-- 
Douglas Bates                            bates@stat.wisc.edu
Statistics Department                    608/262-2598
University of Wisconsin - Madison        http://www.stat.wisc.edu/~bates/
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