[Rd] names function for environments?

Peter Haverty haverty.peter at gene.com
Sun Jan 25 21:21:04 CET 2015


Hi all,

The "ls" function wears two hats. It allows users to inspect an
environment interactively and also serves deeper in code as the
accessor for an environment's names/keys. I propose that we separate
these two conflicting goals, keeping ls for interactive use and adding
names for a quick listing of the hash keys. This involves adding two
lines to do_names in attrib.c.

The 'ls' function and its 'objects' synonym appear very frequently in
performance-critical code like base/R/namespace.R and throughout the
methods package. These functions are currently among the major
contributors to execution time in package loading.

This two-line addition to attrib.c gives a significant speedup for
listing an environment's names/keys (2-60X depending on the 'sorted'
argument). It also simplifies the environment API by making it more
like the other basic types. We already have $ and [[ after all.

Rather than sprinkling sorted=FALSE throughout the methods and base
code, let's use names.

Would you be open to this change?

I have submitted a patch and some timings to the bug tracker as
https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=16170

Regards,
Pete

____________________
Peter M. Haverty, Ph.D.
Genentech, Inc.
phaverty at gene.com



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