[R] converting R objects to C types in .Call

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Tue, 25 Jan 2005, Edzer J. Pebesma wrote:

> Is there a specific reason why, instead of
>
>   CHAR(STRING_ELT(chstr, 0));
>
> The S-Plus compatible
>
>  CHARACTER_POINTER(chstr)[0]
>
> does not work in R?

Yes.

This is really a question for R-devel, but briefly, R and S-PLUS store 
character vectors in very different ways.  This worked prior to 1.2.0, but 
was changed as part of the price of the new (then) garbage collector.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595