R devel - Jun 2009 - How to generate R objects in C?

I'm in the process of coding a parser (in C) to generate R entities
(vectors, lists, etc.) from a text description (different from R).
The basic parser works, and now I need to tell it how to create R
entities.  I need to be able to create character vectors (for unicode
strings), integers, floats, unnamed lists, named lists, boolean
values, and NA.  With the exception of the two types of lists and the
character vectors, all the other objects I need to generate are
"scalars", so I suppose they will correspond to 1-element vectors in
R.  I also need to be able to add R entities to both kinds of lists.

I've been staring at various official documents (ch 5 of Writing R
Extensions, R Internals, Rinternals.h) for this kind of work for some
time, but I can't find the constructors for such objects (here I'm
using the term "constructor" loosely).  I'm even further from
finding
the C equivalent of "my.list[[ length(my.list) + 1 ]] <-
new.thing".

Can someone point me in the right direction?

Thanks!

Kynn

This is indeed details in Writing R Extensions. You should have a closer
look at sections 5.9.3 and 5.9.4. Look at the pieces of C code, they
will help you a lot.

cheers,
Mathieu


Le mercredi 03 juin 2009 ? 00:44 +0200, Kynn Jones a ?crit
:
> I'm in the process of coding a parser (in C) to generate R entities
> (vectors, lists, etc.) from a text description (different from R).
> The basic parser works, and now I need to tell it how to create R
> entities.  I need to be able to create character vectors (for unicode
> strings), integers, floats, unnamed lists, named lists, boolean
> values, and NA.  With the exception of the two types of lists and the
> character vectors, all the other objects I need to generate are
> "scalars", so I suppose they will correspond to 1-element vectors
in
> R.  I also need to be able to add R entities to both kinds of lists.
> 
> I've been staring at various official documents (ch 5 of Writing R
> Extensions, R Internals, Rinternals.h) for this kind of work for some
> time, but I can't find the constructors for such objects (here I'm
> using the term "constructor" loosely).  I'm even further from
finding
> the C equivalent of "my.list[[ length(my.list) + 1 ]] <-
new.thing".
> 
> Can someone point me in the right direction?
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Kynn
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
-- 
Institute of Mathematics
Ecole Polytechnique F?d?rale de Lausanne
STAT-IMA-FSB-EPFL, Station 8
CH-1015 Lausanne   Switzerland
http://stat.epfl.ch/
Tel: + 41 (0)21 693 7907