[Rd] classed

[Thomas Lumley]

On Fri, 15 Sep 2000, Paul Gilbert wrote:
> 
> I've often wondered about this. Any comments from someone who really knows the
> internals of R? When I first implemented it I did some testing and didn't notice
> any really big slowdown and I do use a lot of fairly big (multi MB size)
> objects. But notice that the difference is really in the function call, not in
> the copying of objects. A function using classed would end
> 
>   classed(x, "whatever") }
> 
> rather than
> 
>  class(x) <- "whatever"
>  x}
> 
> I think the copy is (or is not) made in both cases.
> 

Setting an attribute doesn't result in a copy, but setting one in a
function will: a reference to x is initially passed to the function, but
when the attribute is set a copy is made so that the local x rather than
the global one is modified.  I don't think another copy is made when
classed() returns, but I'm not sure. Using classed() makes at least one
more copy that using class()<-.

For interpreted "foo<-" functions this wouldn't be true -- the same
amount of copying would be done either way -- but class() is special.


	-thomas

Thomas Lumley
Assistant Professor, Biostatistics
University of Washington, Seattle


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