[R] assignment by value or reference

Uwe Ligges ligges at statistik.tu-dortmund.de
Wed Sep 15 11:05:30 CEST 2010


See the R Language Definition manual. Since R knows about lazy 
evaluation, it is sometimes neither by reference nor by value.
If you want to think binary, then "by value" fits better than "by 
reference".

Uwe Ligges



On 05.09.2010 17:19, Xiaobo Gu wrote:
> Hi Team,
>
>           Can you please tell me the rules of assignment in R, by value or by reference.
>
>> From my about 3 months of experience of part time job of R, it seems most times it is by value, especially in function parameter and return values assignment; and it is by reference when referencing container sub-objects of container objects, such as elements of List objects and row/column objects of DataFrame objectes; but it is by value when referencing the smallest unit of element of a container object, such as cell of data frame objects.
>
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> Xiaobo.Gu
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