function call overhead
On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 12:13 PM, Paul Gilbert
<pgilbert at bank-banque-canada.ca> wrote:
(subject changed from: RE: [Rd] Avoiding name clashes: opinion on best practice naming ?conventions) Dominick Is this really true? Is there a speed advantage to defining a local function this way, say, within another function, and then calling it within a loop rather than the original? Do you have data on this?
I wondered about this statement too but:
system.time(replicate(1e4, base::print))
user system elapsed 0.539 0.001 0.541
system.time(replicate(1e4, print))
user system elapsed 0.013 0.000 0.012 So it is (relatively) significant, although it's not going to make an impact unless you're doing thousands of function calls. Hadley
Assistant Professor / Dobelman Family Junior Chair Department of Statistics / Rice University http://had.co.nz/