[R] Efficiency of local functions

Thomas Lumley thomas at biostat.washington.edu
Thu Mar 30 17:58:51 CEST 2000


On Thu, 30 Mar 2000, Peter Holzer wrote:

> Dear R-users
> 
> In order to speed up the performance of my program I tried to make a
> function f2 (that is only called from function f1) local to f1. In that way I
> pass one argument less to f2, a huge matrix. (This matrix isn't changed
> inside f2, so - afaik - it is passed by reference and size doesn't matter.)
> Still I would have expected that f1 would be a little faster, but the
> opposit happened:

No, it should be slightly slower.  When f2 is declared inside f1 it has to
be parsed each time f2 is called.  Your figures may well be equal within
experimental error, though.


	-thomas


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