[R] How to move an internal function to external keeping same environment?

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 7:48 AM, Matthieu Stigler
<matthieu.stigler at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi
>
> I have within a quite big function foo1, an internal function foo2. Now, in
> order to have a cleaner code, I wish to have the internal foo2 as
> "external". This foo2 was using arguments within the foo1 environment that
> were not declared as inputs of foo2, which works as long as foo2 is within
> foo1, but not anymore if foo2 is external, as is the case now.
>
> Now, I could add all those arguments as inputs to foo2, but I feel if foo2
> is called often, I would be copying those objects more than required. Am I
> wrong?
>
> I then used this to avoid to declare explcitely each argument to foo2:
>
> foo1<-function(x){
>  b<-x[1]+2
>  environment(foo2)<-new.env(parent =as.environment(-1))
>  c<-foo2(x)
>
> return(c)
> }
>
> foo2<-function(x)  x*b
> #try:
> foo1(1:100)
>
>
> This works. But I wanted to be sure:
>
> -am I right that if I instead declare each element to be passed to foo2,
> this would be more copying than required? (imagine b in my case a heavy
> dataset, foo2 a long computation)
> -is this lines "environment(foo2)<-new.env(parent =as.environment(-1))" the
> good way to do it or it can have unwanted implications?
>

This would be good enough (replacing your environment(foo2)<-... line):

environment(foo2) <- environment()

If you add parameters to foo2 it won't actually copy them unless they
are modified in foo2.


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