R internally uses 32-bit integers for indexing (though this may change). For this and other reasons these external objects with specialized purposes (larger-than-RAM, shared memory) simply can't behave exactly as R objects. Best case, some R functions will work. Others would simply break. Others would perhaps work if the problem is small enough, but would choke in the creation of temporary objects in memory.
I understand your sentiment, but it isn't that easy. If you are interested, however, we do provide examples of authoring functions in C++ which can work interchangeably on both matrix and big.matrix objects. Jay Hi Jay, > > I have a question about your reply. > > You mentioned that "the more serious problem is that you can't expect to > run just any R function on a big.matrix (or on an ff object, if you check > out ff for some nice features). " > > I am confused why the packages could not communicate with each other. I > understand that maybe for some programming or statistical reasons, one > package need its own "class" so that specific algorithm can be implemented. > However, R as a statistical programming environment, one of its advantages > is the abundance of the packages under R structure. If different packages > generate different kinds of object and can not be recognized and used for > further analysis by other packages, then each package would appears to be > similar with the normal independent software, e.g., SAS, MATLAB... then > this could reduce the whole R ability for handling complicated analysis > situation. > > This is just a general thought. > > Thank you very much. > > ------------------------------ > ya > > -- John W. Emerson (Jay) Associate Professor of Statistics Department of Statistics Yale University http://www.stat.yale.edu/~jay [[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.
