too many arguments in foreign function call

  Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:

  > Gregory R. Warnes <gregory_r_warnes at groton.pfizer.com> wrote

  > >
  > >I would like to create an R package that will depend on

  > the ability to use

  > >more than 65 parameters.  Would it be reasonable to expect

  > this patch (or

  > >something equivalent) to be part of , say R > 1.3.1 ?

  >
  > People are slow to upgrade, so you might be better off in the short
  > run to somehow reduce the number of parameters below 65.
  > For example,
  > write a wrapper function that groups a number of scalar parameters
  > into one vector.

Actually, the whole point of the patch was to get out of this.  I want to
keep the code as close to what was written by the original author and as
simple as possible...

Sorry, but I don't see that.  You want to write the wrapper in R?  Why is
it not as simple to write it in C?  I really don't see the need to remove
the limitation in R (or even to have it as high as 65) since R now has
.External() which allows an unlimited list of arguments to be passed to C
code.  I can't believe that the natural R representation is 85 separate
objects, so the natural way looks like a C wrapper translating between R
objects and Fortran pointers.  You can even copy selectively.

The argument is that new code should probably be using .Call (if S
compatibility is relevant) or .External rather than .C, at least provided
that a C wrapper is feasible.  Those interfaces seem very much under-used.
(Including by me, for S3-compatibility reasons.)

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 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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