Hello Barry, With regards to the identical == FALSE, it didn't occur to me - great point, thank you. So question: how did you end up changing the "<-", so to enable the creation of the .metadata object?
Cheers, Tal ----------------Contact Details:------------------------------------------------------- Contact me: tal.gal...@gmail.com | 972-52-7275845 Read me: www.talgalili.com (Hebrew) | www.biostatistics.co.il (Hebrew) | www.r-statistics.com (English) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 12:30 PM, Barry Rowlingson < b.rowling...@lancaster.ac.uk> wrote: > On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 9:37 AM, Tal Galili <tal.gal...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > 4) My real intention is to somehow change the "<-" operator (not simply > the > > assign). I am unsure as to how to do that. > > 5) Are there any major pros/cons to the adding of such meta-data to > objects? > > (for example, excessive overhead on memory/performance) > > I had a go at doing (4) a few years back. The major problem I had was > that if you do: > > y <- 1:10 > x <- y > > with a <- operator that sets a timestamp then: > > identical(x,y) is FALSE. > > I implemented timestamping by adding an attribute to objects during > assigment by modifying the C source, and then lots and lots of R's > tests failed during build because identical things were no longer > identical. > > Might be better to store your metadata in a separate object, .metadata > in the global env perhaps? Then just do: > > .metadata[[name_of_thing]] = list(modified=Sys.time()) > > in your modified assign. > > Performance will only be a problem if your program is doing nothing > else except fiddle with metadata, I reckon. Your program does do > something useful, doesn't it? > > Barry > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.