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squarebrackets

squarebrackets: Subset Methods as Alternatives to the Square Brackets Operators for Programming

Description

Provides subset methods (supporting both atomic and recursive S3 classes) that may be more convenient alternatives to the [ and [<- operators, whilst maintaining similar performance.

Some nice properties of these methods include, but are not limited to, the following:

  1. The [ and [<- operators use different rule-sets for different data.frame-like types (data.frames, data.tables, tibbles, tidytables, etc.). The ‘squarebrackets’ methods use the same rule-sets for the different data.frame-like types.
  2. Performing dimensional subset operations on an array using [ and [<-, requires a-priori knowledge on the number of dimensions the array has. The ‘squarebrackets’ methods work on any arbitrary dimensions without requiring such prior knowledge.
  3. When selecting names with the [ and [<- operators, only the first occurrence of the names are selected in case of duplicate names. The ‘squarebrackets’ methods always perform on all names in case of duplicates, not just the first.
  4. The [<- operator only supports copy-on-modify semantics for most classes. The ‘squarebrackets’ methods provides explicit pass-by-reference and pass-by-value semantics, whilst still respecting things like binding-locks and mutability rules.
  5. ‘squarebrackets’ supports index-less sub-set operations, which is more memory efficient (and better for the environment) for long vectors than sub-set operations using the [ and [<- operators.

 

Get Started

To get started see the Get Started page.

 

Installing & Loading

One can install ‘squarebrackets’ from GitHub like so:

remotes::install_github("https://github.com/tony-aw/squarebrackets")

Special care has been taken to make sure the function names are clear, and that the function names are unlikely to conflict with core R, the recommended R packages, the rstudioapi package, or major packages from the fastverse. So one can attach the package - thus exposing its functions to the namespace - using: