Overview R’s built-in copy-on-modify behavior prevents the user from having two symbols always pointing to the same object. Because pointers, as they are common in other programming languages, are essentially symbols (variables) related to an object that has already another symbol attached to it, it is clear that pointers do not fit naturally into R’s language concept. However, pointers would be indredibly useful, e.g. when you work with complex subsets of dataframes. These complex filtering conditions make the code harder to read and to maintain. For this reason, it would be good to have a kind of ‘abbreviation’ or ‘shortcut’ that lets you write such filtering conditions more efficiently. Thepointr package provides functionality to create pointers to any R object easily, including pointers to subsets/selections from dataframes. Working with pointr Installing and loading pointr To install the CRAN version of pointr from the R console, just call: ...
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