Hadley, That's fine; please do. I'm happy to explain it offline where the documentation or comments in the code aren't sufficient. It's GPL code so you can take it and improve it, or depend on it. Whatever works for you. As long as (of course) you don't stand on it's shoulders and then restrict users' freedoms (not that I'd ever think you'd do that).
One thing that did make it into R was the improvement to unique.c in R 2.12.0. Another that we hope happens one day is changing duplicate.c to use memcpy. That would automatically benefit all users anywhere R copies data (including data.frame). That wasn't our idea; that's been a FIXME in the R source for many years. See thread on r-devel a while back (search for duplicate.c in subject). It probably just needs someone to send a working patch file that passes checks. That's an example of something in the data.table C code that (hopefully) will make it into base R. Matthew "Hadley Wickham" <had...@rice.edu> wrote in message news:AANLkTi=setpquiyr1+avb4-ga1-fyh9uffa6mskk+...@mail.gmail.com... > Does FAQ 1.8 answer that ok ? > "Ok, I'm starting to see what data.table is about, but why didn't you > enhance data.frame in R? Why does it have to be a new package?" > http://datatable.r-forge.r-project.org/datatable-faq.pdf Kind of. I think there are two sets of features data.table provides: * a compact syntax for expressing many common data manipulations * high performance data manipulation FAQ 1.8 answers the question for the syntax, but not for the performance related features. Basically, I'd love to be able to use the high performance components of data table in plyr, but keep using my existing syntax. Currently the only way to do that is for me to dig into your C code to understand why it's fast, and then implement those ideas in plyr. Hadley -- Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair Department of Statistics / Rice University http://had.co.nz/ ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.