Parameters/data that live globally

I am coming to R from Fortran and I used to use fixed size arrays in
named common. common /name1/array(100)

The contents of array can be accessed/modified if and only if this
line occurs in the function.  Very helpful if different functions need
different global data (can have name2, name3 etc. for common data
blocks).

Is there a way to do this in R?

Sure.

But probably better to work in R as the developers intended, rather than 
trying to simulate COMMON blocks per se.

See

 	?list
 	?environment
 	?search
 	10.7 Scope in Intro to R
 	?get
 	?assign

You can collect objects in an environment and pass it to a function or put 
it in the search path. Then you can get/assign objects.

Probably it is easier to work with a list. Here is a toy example

foo <- function(object){ object$x <- object$y + 1; object}
my.list <- list( y = 4:5 )
my.list <- foo(my.list)
my.list

$y
[1] 4 5

$x
[1] 5 6

HTH,

Chuck

Thanks for any help.

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Charles C. Berry                            Dept of Family/Preventive Medicine
cberry at tajo.ucsd.edu			    UC San Diego
http://famprevmed.ucsd.edu/faculty/cberry/  La Jolla, San Diego 92093-0901