I know it has been discussed before, but is there anywhere a good
summary of (1) why R has the 2^31-1 vector length limit on all platforms
(specifically 64-bit, of course) and (b) what would be the
effort/implications of changing it? I think I have seen it but I
couldn't find it and it does not seem to be in the FAQ.
It is *really* annoying me now :( My code is littered with 'if
(prod(dim(...)) < 2^31) {do.something.reasonable()} else
{custom.workaround.for.this.package.and.this.problem.at.this.time.and.please.just.shoot.me.now()}'.
The trouble seems to be that (a) many routines rely on converting
data.frame (or similar) objects to matrix objects and (b) matrix objects
are stored as a vector. Possible fixes would naively seem to be (a)
change the storage of matrix objects which sounds like a major PITA or
(b) change the index of a vector to a long int or similar which might be
a problem for interoperability (e.g. save()) and possibly for underlying
libraries but seems more manageable even if it has to be a fork
(Q-project, anyone, or should we get a decent name this time?) and even
if there are probably internal horrors around that make it harder than I
think it would be.
I am tired of writing C code for the *only* reason that R has this
stupid (you wouldn't implement it like that if you had to start again,
would you?) limitation.
Allan.
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