Robert, thank you very much for such a prompt reply. A question, with your notation below, shouldn't I do my gets on E5 rather than on E1, if E1 is the ancestor? Was that a just typo or am I misunderstanding? In other words to deal with my case, I guess I could do the following (calling hgu95GO my new combined environment): hgu95GO<-hgu95av2GO parent.env(hgu95GO)<-hgu95bGO parent.env(hgu95bGO)<-hgu95cGO parent.env(hgu95cGO)<-hgu95dGO) parent.env(hgu95dGO)<-hgu95eGO and then do my gets on hgu95GO, right? Elisabetta On Wed, 17 Dec 2003, Robert Gentleman wrote: > On Wed, Dec 17, 2003 at 03:47:54PM -0500, Elisabetta Manduchi wrote: > > > > Hi, > > I would like to create an environment that combines the hgu95av2GO, > > hgu95bGO, ...hgu95eGO into just one environment, that I can subsequently > > use as the otkvEnv argument in the ontoTools function otkvEnv2namedSparse. > > Is there a quick and simple way to do this in R, without having to define > > a new hash and the key-value mapping block by block (according to which > > environment the key belongs to)? In other words, I'm asking if there is a > > one-stop way in R to "union" the above 5 environments. > > Sort of, in R there are no hash tables but environments are close so > we used them. They have a rather unique aspect which is the parent > environment. So that if a value is not found in the first environment > the parent is searched. So to solve your problem you could do some > thing like > > parent.env(E2) <- E1 > parent.env(E3) <- E2 > ... > > then do your get's on E1 (with inherits=TRUE, which is the default > in get) and you should be almost set. The one issue that is not > easily solved is the if inherits is TRUE then you search up beyond > the last of your environments (your work space and then the search > list). But that should not be a problem in your case.... > > Robert > > > Thanks, > > Elisabetta > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Bioconductor mailing list > > Bioconductor@stat.math.ethz.ch > > https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/bioconductor > > -- Elisabetta Manduchi Computational Biology and Informatics Laboratory Center for Bioinformatics University of Pennsylvania 1428 Blockley Hall 423 Guardian Drive Philadelphia, PA 19104-6021 phone: 215-573-4408 fax: 215 573-3111 email: manduchi@pcbi.upenn.edu web: http://www.cbil.upenn.edu/~manduchi ---