[R] vsize and nsize

[Z. Todd Taylor]

Tony Long <tdlong at uci.edu> wrote:

> 	I agree that R is not "designed" for large calculations.  On the
> other hand it is nice to have one statistical package to use for all
> calculations.  I mostly deal with Drosophila and DNA, as such I  am an
> amateur statistician and would like to avoid learning a number of
> statistical languages.  With a big Linux box, I can often power through
> things.  In the past I have found it frustrating to do a bunch of stuff in
> SAS only to hit a snag and then have to write (time consuming) "C" code to
> finish the job.  So although not designed for large calculations, R is so
> flexible and logical that it is very attractive to use it for such...I
> think that many other people may be similarly attracted to the language.  I
> would appreciate dialog, as I think that much more may have been
> accomplished in R than was intended by the founders.

R's poor handling of large datasets is half the reason I have
not moved more of my work from S(plus) to R (the other half
being the absence of trellis).  I love its lexical closures, but
they're not worth the memory penalty if you have huge datasets.

Maybe someday R will get something akin to Perl's 'tie'
mechanism that would allow practical analysis of huge
datasets.  Maybe that's not possible.

--Todd
-- 
Z. Todd Taylor
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Todd.Taylor at pnl.gov
Why does cleave mean both separate and adhere?
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