R Language Classes Vectors and lists

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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



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