[Rd] anyway to get R unevaluated expr independent on arguments

[Simon Urbanek]

On Apr 7, 2011, at 5:18 PM, Zheng, Xin (NIH) [C] wrote:

> Hi there,
> 
> Suppose the cmd is "a<-3", I can parse the cmd sexp with R_ParseVector and eval it. My question is - is it possible to parse a cmd like "a <- ?", afterwards evaluation will give corresponding result depend on different argument? In other words, '?' is just a placeholder.
> 

Well, you can use a dummy symbol and replace it later, e.g. parse "a <- `*dummy*`" and then before you evaluate you simply replace all occurrences of the "*dummy*" symbol with any value you want. 

That said, we are in a functional language, so you can actually do it more natively by using a closure like "function(.var1){ a <- .var1 }"  - that saves you the substitution part and is more clean.

Cheers,
Simon