[R] assignment by value or reference

[Xiaobo Gu]

On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 5:05 PM, Uwe Ligges
<ligges at statistik.tu-dortmund.de> wrote:
> See the R Language Definition manual. Since R knows about lazy evaluation,
> it is sometimes neither by reference nor by value.
> If you want to think binary, then "by value" fits better than "by
> reference".
Hi,
Can we think it's eventually by value?

For simple functions such as:
is(df[[1]], "logical")
used to test wheather the first column of data frame df is of type
logical, will a new vector be created and used inside the is function?

Another example,

dbWriteTable(con, "tablename", df) will write the content of data
frame df into a database table, will a new data frame object created
and used inside the dbWriteTable function?

Thanks.


>
> Uwe Ligges
>
>
>
> On 05.09.2010 17:19, Xiaobo Gu wrote:
>>
>> Hi Team,
>>
>>          Can you please tell me the rules of assignment in R, by value or
>> by reference.
>>
>>> From my about 3 months of experience of part time job of R, it seems most
>>> times it is by value, especially in function parameter and return values
>>> assignment; and it is by reference when referencing container sub-objects of
>>> container objects, such as elements of List objects and row/column objects
>>> of DataFrame objectes; but it is by value when referencing the smallest unit
>>> of element of a container object, such as cell of data frame objects.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Xiaobo.Gu
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>        [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>>
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>