[R] Assignment to a list in a function

[Heywood, Giles]

Assignment to a list in a function does not behave as I would expect.

The following function illustrates the point

#----------------------------------------
temp	_ function()
{
nf	_ 2
ns	_ 5
z		_ vector("list",ns)
x		_ matrix(NA,nrow=ns,ncol=nf)
for(j in 1:ns) 
	{
	for(i in 1:nf) 
		{
		x[,i]	_ i+j*100
		}
		
	z[[j]] _ x
		
	print(z[[j]])
	}
z
}
#------------------------------------------

Replacing the line that assigns z[[j]] with the following 2 lines produces
the expected result

	y      _ x
	z[[j]] _ y

Furthermore, I get the expected result by running the function under Splus
6.

My question is: do we have an instance of assignment by reference here?  Is
this behaviour intended?

Giles Heywood



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