"privileged slots",
On Tue, 2004-06-01 at 12:21, Torsten Steuernagel wrote:
On 28 May 2004 at 8:19, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
I'd advise against doing this kind of optimization. It will make your code harder to maintain, and while it might be faster today, if "@<-" is really a major time sink, it's an obvious candidate for optimization in R, e.g. by making it .Internal or .Primitive. When that happens, your "optimized" code will likely be slower (if it even works at all).
Agreed. I don't recommend doing this either. I don't believe it makes any difference using "slot<-" instead of "@<-" in real life. Anyway, that "optimized" code should always work (slower or not) because "slot<-" is fully documented and I don't see why it should be removed or its behaviour should change. That wouldn't only break the kind of code mentioned here but also everything else that makes use of "slot<-".
There are several other things that were fully documented and still were removed. One of the latest cases was print.coefmat which was abruptly made Defunct without warning or grace period: code written for 1.8* didn't work in 1.9.0 and if corrected for 1.9.0 it wouldn't work in pre-1.9.0. Anything can change in R without warning, and your code may be broken anytime. Just be prepared. cheers, jari oksanen
Jari Oksanen <jarioksa at sun3.oulu.fi>