R help - May 2010 - closest match in R to c-like struct?

Hello,

What would be in R the closest match to a c-struct? e.g. data.frame requires all
elements to be of the same length ... or is there a way to circumvent this?

TIA,
Best regards,
Giovanni

On 01/05/2010 10:46 AM, Giovanni Azua wrote:
> Hello,
>
> What would be in R the closest match to a c-struct? e.g. data.frame
requires all elements to be of the same length ... or is there a way to
circumvent this?
>
>   
A list is completely free-form.  An S4 object has a defined structure.  
So if you just want to remove the restrictive structure of the 
dataframe, use a list, but if you need the defined structure of a 
struct, use S4.

Duncan Murdoch

On 01-May-10 14:46:28, Giovanni Azua wrote:
> Hello,
> What would be in R the closest match to a c-struct? e.g. data.frame
> requires all elements to be of the same length ... or is there a way to
> circumvent this?
> 
> TIA,
> Best regards,
> Giovanni
Well, 'list' must be pretty close! The main difference would be
that in C the structure type would be declared first, and then
applied to create an object with that structure, whereas an R
lists are created straight off. If you want to set up a generic
list type for a certain purpose, you would wrap its definition
in a function.

Another difference is that R lacks the "pointer" type, so that
R's "mylist$component" is the equivalent of C's
"mylist.component";
I don't think you can do the equivalent in R of C's
"mylist->component"
(though I'm likely to be wrong about that, and to be promptly corrected)!

Hopingb this helps,
Ted.

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Date: 01-May-10                                       Time: 16:04:06
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