Primitive {base}

R Documentation

Call a “Primitive” Internal Function

Description

.Primitive returns an entry point to a ‘primitive’ (internally implemented) function.

Usage

.Primitive(name)

Arguments

name	name of the R function.

Details

The advantage of .Primitive over .Internal functions is the potential efficiency of argument passing. However, this is done by ignoring argument names and using positional matching of arguments (unless arranged differently for specific primitives such as rep), so this is discouraged for functions of more than one argument.

All primitive functions are in the base name space.

See Also

.Internal.

Examples

mysqrt <- .Primitive("sqrt")
c
.Internal # this one *must* be primitive!
get("if") # just 'if' or 'print(if)' are not syntactically ok.

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