how to get a primitive function object
On 1/23/2009 1:47 PM, Yi Zhang wrote:
On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 5:15 AM, Patrick Burns <pburns at pburns.seanet.com> wrote:
If I understand properly, you want '<-' to be a generic function, which it currently isn't. There may be a way to fake that (I can't think of any). But I'm wondering if you should rethink what you want. The only reason that I can think of that you would want to change '<-' is because of some extra side effect that you want to happen. That is not in the spirit of R.
Yes, I wanted some side effect of '<-', to have my own reference counting for some large resource. I guess this is already the most non-intrusive way I can think of--initially I modified R's source code, an even worse option.
External pointers are the standard way to do that. You don't need to worry about reference counting, R's garbage collector will call a finalizer when it doesn't need the object any more. I think the usual example of this is the RODBC package, which maintains database connections that way. If it and the Writing R Extensions manual aren't enough docs for you, you should probably move the question to the R-devel list: this is pretty technical for R-help. Duncan Murdoch