Or better still, extend R via the mechanisms in place. Something akin to a fast factor package. Any change to R causes downstream issues in (hundreds of?) millions of lines of deployed code.
It almost seems hard to fathom that a package for this doesn't already exist. Have you searched CRAN? Jeff On Sat, Nov 5, 2011 at 11:30 AM, Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimi...@club.fr> wrote: > Le vendredi 04 novembre 2011 à 19:19 -0400, Stavros Macrakis a écrit : >> R factors are the natural way to represent factors -- and should be >> efficient since they use small integers. But in fact, for many (but >> not all) operations, R factors are considerably slower than integers, >> or even character strings. This appears to be because whenever a >> factor vector is subsetted, the entire levels vector is copied. > Is it so common for a factor to have so many levels? One can probably > argue that, in that case, using a numeric or character vector is > preferred - factors are no longer the "natural way" of representing this > kind of data. > > Adding code to fix a completely theoretical problem is generally not a > good idea. I think you'd have to come up with a real use case to hope > convincing the developers a change is needed. There are probably many > more interesting areas where speedups can be gained than that. > > > Regards > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > -- Jeffrey Ryan jeffrey.r...@lemnica.com www.lemnica.com www.esotericR.com ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
