[R] Interfacing pre-existing C++ library from R

[Alexander Duering]

Hello,

I'm trying to link a large in-house C++ library into R. So far, I've managed to to most of what I want, but I have one remaining question and a suggestion.

The suggestion first: I've found it useful to put

     #ifdef __cplusplus
     extern "C" {
     #endif

and
     #ifdef __cplusplus
     }
     #endif

around the function prototypes in Rinternals.h (in /usr/local/lib/R/include on my Red Hat 7.2 box) so my dynamic linker would no longer complain about mangling-related undefined symbols. Also, I had to use #define USE_RINTERNALS before including them in order to get a few macros I suppose are natural to use. To be honest, I do think the include files could do with a bit of cleaning up, in particular in view of linking in C++ code, but no complaints (I'm very happy to have R as it is).

My question is this: Our library makes extensive use of matrices of mixed type, i.e., I would need to pass in and out objects that are logically of rectangular structure, but some cells contain numbers, others strings. I had initially hoped to be able to use data frames for that, but I realise that columns have to be of identical mode. I could, if nothing else works, use string matrices, but that would be very very unsatisfactory (and take ages, because I'd have to check, and possibly convert, each matrix element). Could somebody please suggest the 'natural' R data structure for this kind of object? I'm using cell arrays in Matlab and lists of lists in Perl for that purpose, if it's any help.

Many thanks,

Alex



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