Hello David, Let me try again, I don't think this was the best post ever I've made :-) Hopefully this is clearer, or otherwise I may break this up into three separate simple queries as this may be too long.
> "==" is not an assignment operator in R, so the answer is that it > would do neither. "<-" and "=" can do assignment. In neither case > would it be a "deep copy". It was late when I posted the code, I made a mistake with regard to the assignment operator and used the boolean compare instead -- thanks for catching that. It should have been: keep_pop[1:POP_SIZE] = pop[1:POP_SIZE] -------- Here's an edited and clearer version I hope: The basic idea is that I am trying to keep track of a number of bitrings. Therefore I am creating a matrix (named 'pop') whose rows are made up of bit vectors (ie my bitstrings). I only initialize half of the rows with my bitstrings of random 1s and 0s, the rest of the rows are set to all zeros). So I use following function call to create a matrix and fill it with bit strings: pop=create_pop_2(POP_SIZE, LEN) where POP_SIZE refers to the number of rows LEN to the columns (length of my bitstrings) This is the code I call: #################################################### # create a random binary vector of size "len" # create_bin_Chromosome <- function(len) { sample(0:1, len, replace=T) } ############## create_population ################### # create population of chromosomes of length len # the matrix contains twice as much space as popsize # create_pop_2 <- function(popsize, len) { datasize=len*popsize print(datasize) npop <- matrix(0, popsize*2, len, byrow=T) for(i in 1:popsize) npop[i,] = create_bin_Chromosome(len) npop } My 3 questions: (1) If I did keep_pop[1:POP_SIZE] = pop[1:POP_SIZE] to keep a copy of the original data structure before manipulating 'pop' potentially, would this make a deep copy or just shallow? Ie if I change something in pop would keep_pop change too? I would like two independent copies so that 'keep_pop' stays intact while 'pop' may change. > "<-" and "=" can do assignment. In neither case would it be a > "deep copy". Is there a deepcopy operator, or would I have to have two nested loops and iterate through them? Or is there a nice R-idiomatic way to do this? (2) If I wanted to change the order of rows in my matrix 'pop', is there an easy way to shuffle these? I.e., I don't want to change any of the bitstrings vectors/rows, just the order of the rows in the matrix 'pop'. (E.g., in Python I could just say something like suffle(pop)) - is there an equivalent for R? So if pop [ [0, 0, 0] [1, 1, 1] [1, 1, 0] ] after the shuffle it may look like [ [1, 1, 0] (originally at index 2) [1, 1, 1] (originally at index 1) [0, 0, 0] ] (originally at index 0) the rows themselves remained intact, just their order changes. This is a tiny example, in my case I may have 100 rows (POPS_SIZE) and rows of LEN 200. (3) I would like to compare the contents of 'keep_pop' (a copy of the original 'pop') with the current 'pop'. Though the order of rows may be different between the two, it should not matter as long as the same rows are present. So for the example given above, the comparison should return True. For instance, in Python this would be simply if sorted(keep_pop) == sorted(pop): print 'they are equal' else print 'they are not equal' Is there an equivalent R code segment? I hope this post is clearer than my original one. Thank you David for pointing out some of the shortcomings of my earlier post. Thanks, Esmail ______________________________________________ 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.