>>>>> Peter Haverty <haverty.pe...@gene.com>
>>>>> on Sun, 25 Jan 2015 12:21:04 -0800 writes:
> Hi all,
> The "ls" function wears two hats. It allows users to inspect an
> environment interactively and also serves deeper in code as the
> accessor for an environment's names/keys. I propose that we separate
> these two conflicting goals, keeping ls for interactive use and adding
> names for a quick listing of the hash keys. This involves adding two
> lines to do_names in attrib.c.
> The 'ls' function and its 'objects' synonym appear very frequently in
> performance-critical code like base/R/namespace.R and throughout the
> methods package. These functions are currently among the major
> contributors to execution time in package loading.
> This two-line addition to attrib.c gives a significant speedup for
> listing an environment's names/keys (2-60X depending on the 'sorted'
> argument). It also simplifies the environment API by making it more
> like the other basic types. We already have $ and [[ after all.
> Rather than sprinkling sorted=FALSE throughout the methods and base
> code, let's use names.
as for list()s and other (generalized) vectors.
This sounds appealing at first, and I have heard/seen others propose
it. I see one good reason *not* to allow it (and you mention the
reason by mentioning 'sorted') :
The contents of an environment are inherently unordered, and
even if the order stays fixed for a while, no code should rely
on the ordering of the objects, and for that reason,
<env>[1] etc do not make sense and are not allowed.
> Would you be open to this change?
I'm undecided currently:
"-": reason above;
"+": convenience, compacter R code using it;
very simple and natural change to src/main/attrib.c
and waiting for other comments, not the least from other members of R core ..
Martin Maechler, ETH Zurich
> I have submitted a patch and some timings to the bug tracker as
> https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=16170
> Regards,
> Pete
> ____________________
> Peter M. Haverty, Ph.D.
> Genentech, Inc.
> phave...@gene.com
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