[Rcpp-devel] Passing arguments by value: unexpected behaviour

[Johannes Egner]

Romain,

many thanks for the (incredibly speedy) reply.

You are missing that :
>
> > typeof( 1:2 )
> [1] "integer"
>
> So as.double creates a new numeric vector, but:
>
> > typeof( 1 )
> [1] "double"
>
> So as.double just returns its input. as.double is a primitive function in
> R, so it does not really have pass by value semantics.
>

Ok, I %really% should have picked up on that -- my R knowledge usually does
stretch this far.


> By design, when you create an Rcpp object, you don't get a copy of the
> original object, you point to the same SEXP.


Yup, I know that from the documentation.


> If you want a copy, you can use clone, as in :
>
> NumericVector vec = clone<NumericVector>(arg)
>

This is a very interesting function (templated, I suppose) -- I haven't seen
this in the examples/presentations. Thanks.

Incidentally, I have seen you now have a cheat sheet (or quick reference, as
it's called on CRAN). I think this is very good idea for a certain group of
users (like me -- those that want to get results relatively quickly without
getting into %all% the nitty-gritty details), and it is worth keeping up to
date. Clone as above for instance seems like a good candidate to add. Maybe
the tex-source can even be put on some website (for personal
additions/alterations)?

Best, Jo
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