A useful extension of ALTREP is having two new string methods which return the number of characters of a given string element and to return a substring of an element.
Having these methods would allow retrieving these values without needing to create a CHARSXP for the full element data, which could potentially be costly for long elements. For example say you have an ALTREP altstring vector where each element holds the sequence of a single chromosome, it would be useful to query the lengths of each chromosome and retrieve the first 100 characters etc. without having to put the whole chromosome in memory. I realize there are tools in Bioconductor to handle this particular case, but it seems the general case would be perfect for ALTREP. Jim ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
