Fair enough -- hadn't thought of going the other way. I do remember looking at that C trick once, but I'm actually somewhat surprised Fortan has it natively: I had always associated multiple basing with something like VBA that has to keep everyone on board but no one happy. Seems a surprisingly flexible feature for a language that doesn't allow miniscule letters.
Michael On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 8:45 AM, S Ellison <s.elli...@lgcgroup.com> wrote: > R. Michael Weylandt wrote: >> >> This may be an unnecessary aside, but other than obfuscating >> code or allowing people to never stop thinking in C and start >> thinking in R, what practical purpose would this package >> serve in an R context? >> > > I'd think about constructs like > income[1990:2010] > > which work nicely with arbitrary indexing. (Oarray isn;t just 0) > > Fortran has it natively; C doesn't, but it was useful enough for Numerical > Recipes to provide code for arbitrary array index origin for C arrays (it > used a pointer shift, if I recall correctly). The most obvious native R > appraoch I can think of is using names (eg income[paste(1990:2010)] ), which > is very general but has its own disadvantages in terms of readability and, > maybe, speed. > > S Ellison > LGC******************************************************************* > This email and any attachments are confidential. Any use...{{dropped:8}} > > ______________________________________________ > 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. > ______________________________________________ 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.