On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 11:27 PM, Peng Yu <pengyu...@gmail.com> wrote: > I don't see where describes the implementation of '[]'. > > For example, if x is a matrix or a data.frame, how the lookup of > 'colname1' is x[, 'colname1'] executed. Does R perform a lookup in the > a hash of the colnames? Is the reference O(1) or O(n), where n is the > second dim of x?
Where have you looked? I doubt this kind of implementation detail is in the .Rd documentation since a regular user doesn't care for it. As Obi-wan Kenobi may have said in Star Wars: "Use the source, Luke!": Line 450 of subscript.c of the source code of R 2.10 is the stringSubscript function. It has this comment: /* The original code (pre 2.0.0) used a ns x nx loop that was too * slow. So now we hash. Hashing is expensive on memory (up to 32nx * bytes) so it is only worth doing if ns * nx is large. If nx is * large, then it will be too slow unless ns is very small. */ The definition of "large" and "small" here appears to be such that: 457: Rboolean usehashing = in && ( ((ns > 1000 && nx) || (nx > 1000 && ns)) || (ns * nx > 15*nx + ns) ); Barry ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
