R Language Classes Vectors and lists
Example
Data in R are stored in vectors. A typical vector is a sequence of values all having the same storage mode (e.g., characters vectors, numeric vectors). See ?atomic for details on the atomic implicit classes and their corresponding storage modes: "logical", "integer", "numeric" (synonym "double"), "complex", "character" and "raw". Many classes are simply an atomic vector with a class attribute on top:
x <- 1826
class(x) <- "Date"
x
# [1] "1975-01-01"
x <- as.Date("1970-01-01")
class(x)
#[1] "Date"
is(x,"Date")
#[1] TRUE
is(x,"integer")
#[1] FALSE
is(x,"numeric")
#[1] FALSE
mode(x)
#[1] "numeric"
Lists are a special type of vector where each element can be anything, even another list, hence the R term for lists: "recursive vectors":
mylist <- list( A = c(5,6,7,8), B = letters[1:10], CC = list( 5, "Z") )
Lists have two very important uses:
-
Since functions can only return a single value, it is common to return complicated results in a list:
f <- function(x) list(xplus = x + 10, xsq = x^2) f(7) # $xplus # [1] 17 # # $xsq # [1] 49 -
Lists are also the underlying fundamental class for data frames. Under the hood, a data frame is a list of vectors all having the same length:
L <- list(x = 1:2, y = c("A","B")) DF <- data.frame(L) DF # x y # 1 1 A # 2 2 B is.list(DF) # [1] TRUE
The other class of recursive vectors is R expressions, which are "language"- objects
