[R] vsize and nsize

[Ross Ihaka]

On Mon, 17 May 1999, Z. Todd Taylor wrote:

> Tony Long <tdlong at uci.edu> wrote:
> 
> > 	I agree that R is not "designed" for large calculations.  On the
> > other hand it is nice to have one statistical package to use for all
> > calculations.  I mostly deal with Drosophila and DNA, as such I  am an
> > amateur statistician and would like to avoid learning a number of
> > statistical languages.  With a big Linux box, I can often power through
> > things.  In the past I have found it frustrating to do a bunch of stuff in
> > SAS only to hit a snag and then have to write (time consuming) "C" code to
> > finish the job.  So although not designed for large calculations, R is so
> > flexible and logical that it is very attractive to use it for such...I
> > think that many other people may be similarly attracted to the language.  I
> > would appreciate dialog, as I think that much more may have been
> > accomplished in R than was intended by the founders.
> 
> R's poor handling of large datasets is half the reason I have
> not moved more of my work from S(plus) to R (the other half
> being the absence of trellis).  I love its lexical closures, but
> they're not worth the memory penalty if you have huge datasets.
> 
> Maybe someday R will get something akin to Perl's 'tie'
> mechanism that would allow practical analysis of huge
> datasets.  Maybe that's not possible.

Both of these things are being worked on for R 1.0, but I can't give
any timeframe, sorry.  I have a design for the memory changes and have
begun implementation experiments.  Paul Murrell and some others are
thinking about a ``lattice'' graphics package -- the name ``trellis''
begin trademarked :-)

	Ross

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