R help - Sep 2004 - allocating memory in C, not in R

Dear R helpers,

I need to retrieve several vectors of various types from a call 
to .C(), but I don't know their length in advance. 
Is there a way to do this without allocating an excessive amount 
of memory? 
If so, an example would be very helpful.


S. Blay
Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science
Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia

S. Blay wrote:
> Dear R helpers,
> 
> I need to retrieve several vectors of various types from a call 
> to .C(), but I don't know their length in advance. 
> Is there a way to do this without allocating an excessive amount 
> of memory? 
> If so, an example would be very helpful.
> 
> 
You should probably use the .Call interface instead of .C in this case.

--sundar

On Wed, 1 Sep 2004, S. Blay wrote:
> I need to retrieve several vectors of various types from a call 
> to .C(), but I don't know their length in advance. 
> Is there a way to do this without allocating an excessive amount 
> of memory? 
> If so, an example would be very helpful.
It would be very much easier to use .Call rather than .C.

Alternatively, generate and allocate in C on one C call and retrieve on a
second, as rpart does.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595