[datatable-help] Auto-convert characters to factors when settings keys?

[Steve Lianoglou]

On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 9:39 AM, Short, Tom <TShort at epri.com> wrote:

>> I guess I don't understand why you'd want to make setdf and
>> setdt instead of using the as.data.frame/as.data.table functions?
>>
>> Isn't the as.* more idiomatic S3-OOized R?
>
> You're right, it's not very standard for R, but if I have a 9-GB data table, I may not want the memory consumption of keeping both copies around. Because it's nonstandard, maybe it shouldn't be in data.table, but it's worth discussing.

Ahh ... good point.

I see their use case now ;-)

+1 for having something like these so people who know what they're
doing can use them.

-- 
Steve Lianoglou
Graduate Student: Computational Systems Biology
 | Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
 | Weill Medical College of Cornell University
Contact Info: http://cbio.mskcc.org/~lianos/contact