[R] name of the variable that will contain the result of a function

Thomas Lumley tlumley at u.washington.edu
Wed Jun 6 16:31:56 CEST 2007


On Wed, 6 Jun 2007, Benilton Carvalho wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> say I have a function called 'foo', which takes the argument arg1.
>
> Is there any mechanism that I can use to "learn" about the variable
> where foo(arg1) is going to be stored?

No. This information isn't available explicitly even at the C level.

> For example:
>
> x <- foo(arg1)
>
> so, inside foo() I'd like to be able to get the string "x".
>
> if,
>
> foo(arg1)
>
> was used insted, I'd like to get NA.

It could be much worse that this, for example,
    x[[7]][y][[4]] <- foo(arg1)
    w <- foo(arg2)+1
    names(x)[foo(arg3)] <- foo(arg4)

 	-thomas



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