[Rd] Improving string concatenation

[Gábor Csárdi]

On Tue, Jun 16, 2015 at 10:30 PM, Joshua Bradley <jgbradley1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> One of the poster's on the SO post I linked to previously suggested this but
> if '+' were made to be S4 compliant, then adding the ability to concat
> strings with '+' would be a relatively simple addition (no pun intended) to
> the code base I believe. With a lot of other languages supporting this kind
> of concatenation, this is what surprised me most when first learning R.
>
> This is where my (lack of) experience in R starts to show and why I brought
> up the question about performance. I'm wondering how bad performance would
> be effected by making '+' (or all arithmetic operators in general) S4
> compliant.

I don't know much about S4, but '+' is already generic, so
implementation would be
easy I guess. Also, since it is already generic, I don't think this
would affect performance at all. (But FIXME please.)

The reason why it is not implemented is not because it is difficult.

Gabor

> Josh Bradley