[R] list to data frame by rows ...

[Peter Dalgaard BSA]

Johann Petrak <johann at ai.univie.ac.at> writes:

> What is the best way to learn about how things are done internally in R?
> I didnt come across this anywhere in the documentation, but
> maybe I overlooked it.
> 
> It would be nice to have something like "R for programmers"
> that elaborates a bit on the internal data structures, 
> and the kind and efficiency of (basic) operations  on them.
> Like, every LISP programmer knows which operations on lists
> will be fast and which slow, and how e.g. make appending
> to the end of a list fast, when do shallow or deep copies
> occur, what will cause GC and what avoids it.

That's to some extent what the R language reference tries to do, but
for many topics, the actual text needs to be written. (As you know,
there are two problems with documentation: (a) getting people to write
it (b) getting people to read it). Of course the ultimate answer is
the source code...

R doesn't really have lists in the LISP sense, except in its
internals. They are really generic vectors and thus have a fixed
length (so extending them requires a copy). There's the occasional
object of mode "pairlist" visible in R; these are LISP-like, but you
can't really do anything with them.

> So just as a basic question here: will all assignments of big
> datastructures always do a deep copy?

There's no concept of references, so in that sense, yes (.Alias()
notwithstanding). However, R does try to be smart about intermediate
results by keeping track of whether and object is named and not
duplicating if it is not.

Assignment to a part of a structure will not (usually) cause
duplication, unless the size is changed.

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907
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