Gabor Grothendieck wrote: > >> - this still does not allow one to use the names directly, only as >> L$first etc., with the syntactic and semantic (longer lookup times) penalty; >> > > That's how it should be done. Using the auto split you get many > variables which is not desirable. it encourages bad programming. > >
please provide a reference for this claim. for both the 'should' and the 'bad'. >> - using structure you add yet another source of performance penalty; a >> quick naive benchmark hints that it doubles the time elapsed if the >> returned list is inaccessible otherwise, and adds one order of magnitude >> if the list has to be copied: >> > > There is no difference between structure and assignment. They are both > operations. If there is a timing difference that is a different question. > as far as i get the r semantics, applying structure modifies the object, and causes the content to be copied if the object is referred to from elsewhere. here's where structure does add a considerable performance penalty. > >>> or one could define a function to do that without having >>> to modify the language. Given the relative infrequency >>> of this it hardly seems to merit a language feature. >>> >>> >> infrequency of what? of people's inventing ugly hacks to get arround >> the inability to capture multiple return values directly? sure, this is >> a good argument against having someone do the job, but is it a good >> argument against having the feature in the language? >> > > I have never had to use it even though I had it available for years. > I do lots of R code so I think it speaks for itself. > it speaks for yourself. it tells nothing about what others would like. it's quite possible that few would like it, but it does not follow from that you wouldn't. vQ ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
