On Fri, 1 Oct 2004 11:57:27 -0400, Robert Gentleman <rgentlem@jimmy.harvard.edu> wrote: > On Fri, Oct 01, 2004 at 04:58:40PM +0200, Adrian Alexa wrote: > > Dear Bioconductor developers, > > > > > > I'm using Bioconductor packages and I use more often environments. I > > was happy to see that there are new functions in the Biobase package > > that work with environments: copyEnv, l2e, etc. > > And there are even more in R itself, things like $ and [[ work (but > NOT for numeric indices, only for character values and they do NOT do > partial matching). Also of note is as.list, which will coerce an > environment to a list. If you want something that let's you peak at > the values let me suggest DPExplorer. > > And also, please do note that eapply is a reasonable choice of apply > for environments. > > > > > > Unfortunately I didn't find a function that returns the 'lenght' (no. > > of elements) of an environment. I know that I can do: > > > > > length(ls(env)) > > why not length(env), which seems to both work and be faster... > > > > > > but I think this is slow and somehow redundant. Also I know that I can > > write a simple C function, but I will like to have this facility into > > R and not loading my function every time. > > > > I would like to know if such a function can (or will) be included into > > a next version of biobase package. > > > > > > Many thanks, > > > > Adrian > > > > Thank you very much for your answer Robert. I know about the facilities that R offer for environments, but I was saying that I found the new Biobase functions very useful . Probably I wasn't to clear, so I will try to explain again what I wanted. First, I'm using R 1.9.1 on a Debian Sarge machine and as far as I observed eapply is not in this version (I sow is a R 2.0 feature, which I think is great). As for length(env) it does not work on this version. If this is a facility of the new R 2.0 version that please excuse my impatience. This is a small example of what I would expected: > e <- new.env(hash = T, parent = NULL) > assign('a', 1, e) > assign('b', letters[1:5], e) > length(e) [1] 0 > length(ls(e)) [1] 2 > ls(e) [1] "a" "b" I'm working with GO and GOstats packages and I will like a function that will do: > envLen(GOTERM) [1] 16843 Of course I can do > length(ls(GOTERM)) [1] 16843 or > length(as.list(GOTERM)) [1] 16843 but I think this is slow for big environments. I sow, by looking at the envToList() C code that the length of the environment can be easily obtain (using internal C function length(env)), so I was taking about having a R version of this function. Thank you again for your answer, Adrian Alexa