[R] Any container in R?

[Thomas Lumley]

On Mon, 1 Jan 2007, Feng Qiu wrote:

> Hi Duncan:
>         Thank you very much! I checked out unique(), it does exactly what I
> want. But I'm still curious about if R provides "STL"(standard template
> library).

No.

Some things the STL does aren't needed in R, others are implemented 
differently, and others aren't implemented.

One particularly important example is iterators, which will often either 
happen invisibly due to vectorized operations or will be done with the 
*apply family of functions.

Your example could have been done either way. Using duplicated() is the 
vectorized approach; the apply approach would use tapply().

C++ is not terribly similar to R. A lot of the effort in STL is expended 
on allowing a piece of code to be used on different types (where 
appropriate). In R you have to expend effort on stopping a piece of code 
being used on different types (where inappropriate).


 	-thomas

Thomas Lumley			Assoc. Professor, Biostatistics
tlumley at u.washington.edu	University of Washington, Seattle