On 05/04/2010 7:35 AM, Roger Gill wrote:
Dear All,
I would like some advice on creating R packages, passing by reference and oo R.
I have created a package that is neither elegant nor extensible and rather
cumbersome (it works). I would like to re write the code to make the package
distributable (should it be of interest) and easy to maintain.
The package is for Bayesian model determination via a reversible jump algorithm
and has currently been written to minimise computational expense.
At every iteration of the MCMC I make a call to a likelihood function. Here, I
pass by value a matrix containing the explanatory variables of the current
model and this is quite costly if X is quite large. This matrix could change at
every iteration (it's certainly proposed). Ideally I would pass by reference (a
pointer in C, \@ in perl etc...) and allow the user to specify this function
should they so desire. This is where I become a little stuck.
I have searched the lists, used google and not found a accepted solution. How
do I pass by ref? What are my options? Can you point me towards some suitable
reading? Are there any good examples? How have others overcome this problem.
R discourages passing by reference; it encourages a functional style of
programming. You can do references by using an external pointer (so the
contents of the object are managed entirely in your C code), or by
putting the object into an environment, and passing the environment around.
Duncan Murdoch
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