R Exts

Writing R Extensions
Version 2.10.0 (2009-10-26)

R Development Core Team

Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copy-
right notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the condi-
tions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under
the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual into another language,
under the above conditions for modified versions, except that this permission notice may be
stated in a translation approved by the R Development Core Team.
Copyright c 1999–2009 R Development Core Team
ISBN 3-900051-11-9

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1 Creating R packages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.1 Package structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.1.1 The ‘DESCRIPTION’ file . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.1.2 The ‘INDEX’ file . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.1.3 Package subdirectories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.1.4 Package bundles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
1.1.5 Data in packages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
1.2 Configure and cleanup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1.2.1 Using ‘Makevars’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
1.2.1.1 Back-compatibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
1.2.2 Configure example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
1.2.3 Using F95 code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
1.3 Checking and building packages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
1.3.1 Checking packages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
1.3.2 Building packages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
1.3.3 Customizing checking and building. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
1.4 Writing package vignettes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
1.5 Submitting a package to CRAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
1.6 Package name spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
1.6.1 Specifying imports and exports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
1.6.2 Registering S3 methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
1.6.3 Load hooks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
1.6.4 An example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
1.6.5 Summary – converting an existing package . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
1.6.6 Name spaces with S4 classes and methods. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
1.7 Writing portable packages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
1.7.1 Encoding issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
1.8 Diagnostic messages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
1.9 Internationalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
1.9.1 C-level messages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
1.9.2 R messages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
1.9.3 Installing translations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
1.9.4 Makefile support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
1.10 CITATION files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
1.11 Package types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
1.11.1 Frontend . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
1.11.2 Translation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
1.12 Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34

2 Writing R documentation files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
2.1 Rd format . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
2.1.1 Documenting functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
2.1.2 Documenting data sets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
2.1.3 Documenting S4 classes and methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
2.1.4 Documenting packages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

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2.2 Sectioning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
2.3 Marking text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
2.4 Lists and tables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
2.5 Cross-references . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
2.6 Mathematics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
2.7 Insertions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
2.8 Indices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
2.9 Platform-specific documentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
2.10 Conditional text. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
2.11 Dynamic pages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
2.12 Encoding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
2.13 Processing Rd format . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
2.14 Back-compatibility issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
2.14.1 Changes in R 2.10.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
2.14.2 Changes in R 2.9.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
2.14.3 Unnumbered versions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

3 Tidying and profiling R code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
3.1 Tidying R code. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
3.2 Profiling R code for speed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
3.3 Profiling R code for memory use . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
3.3.1 Memory statistics from Rprof . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
3.3.2 Tracking memory allocations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
3.3.3 Tracing copies of an object . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
3.4 Profiling compiled code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
3.4.1 Linux . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
3.4.1.1 sprof . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
3.4.1.2 oprofile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
3.4.2 Solaris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
3.4.3 Mac OS X . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

4 Debugging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
4.1 Browsing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
4.2 Debugging R code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
4.3 Using gctorture and valgrind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
4.3.1 Using gctorture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
4.3.2 Using valgrind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
4.4 Debugging compiled code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
4.4.1 Finding entry points in dynamically loaded code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
4.4.2 Inspecting R objects when debugging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

5 System and foreign language interfaces. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
5.1 Operating system access . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
5.2 Interface functions .C and .Fortran . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
5.3 dyn.load and dyn.unload . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
5.4 Registering native routines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
5.5 Creating shared objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
5.6 Interfacing C++ code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
5.7 Fortran I/O . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
5.8 Linking to other packages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
5.8.1 Unix-alikes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
5.8.2 Windows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
5.9 Handling R objects in C . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77

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5.9.1 Handling the effects of garbage collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
5.9.2 Allocating storage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
5.9.3 Details of R types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
5.9.4 Attributes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
5.9.5 Classes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
5.9.6 Handling lists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
5.9.7 Handling character data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
5.9.8 Finding and setting variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
5.9.9 Some convenience functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
5.9.10 Named objects and copying . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
5.10 Interface functions .Call and .External . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
5.10.1 Calling .Call . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
5.10.2 Calling .External . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
5.10.3 Missing and special values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
5.11 Evaluating R expressions from C . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
5.11.1 Zero-finding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
5.11.2 Calculating numerical derivatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
5.12 Parsing R code from C . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
5.13 External pointers and weak references . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
5.13.1 An example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
5.14 Vector accessor functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
5.15 Character encoding issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99

6 The R API: entry points for C code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
6.1 Memory allocation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
6.1.1 Transient storage allocation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
6.1.2 User-controlled memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
6.2 Error handling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
6.2.1 Error handling from FORTRAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
6.3 Random number generation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
6.4 Missing and IEEE special values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
6.5 Printing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
6.5.1 Printing from FORTRAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
6.6 Calling C from FORTRAN and vice versa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
6.7 Numerical analysis subroutines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
6.7.1 Distribution functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
6.7.2 Mathematical functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
6.7.3 Numerical Utilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
6.7.4 Mathematical constants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
6.8 Optimization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
6.9 Integration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
6.10 Utility functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
6.11 Re-encoding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
6.12 Allowing interrupts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
6.13 Platform and version information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
6.14 Inlining C functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
6.15 Controlling visibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
6.16 Using these functions in your own C code. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
6.17 Organization of header files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114

7 Generic functions and methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
7.1 Adding new generics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117

iv

8 Linking GUIs and other front-ends to R . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
8.1 Embedding R under Unix-alikes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
8.1.1 Compiling against the R library . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
8.1.2 Setting R callbacks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
8.1.3 Registering symbols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
8.1.4 Meshing event loops . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
8.1.5 Threading issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
8.2 Embedding R under Windows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
8.2.1 Using (D)COM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
8.2.2 Calling R.dll directly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124

Function and variable index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128

Concept index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131

Acknowledgements 1

Acknowledgements
The contributions of Saikat DebRoy (who wrote the first draft of a guide to using .Call and
.External) and of Adrian Trapletti (who provided information on the C++ interface) are grate-
fully acknowledged.

Chapter 1: Creating R packages 2

1 Creating R packages
Packages provide a mechanism for loading optional code and attached documentation as needed.
The R distribution provides several packages.
In the following, we assume that you know the ‘library()’ command, including its ‘lib.loc’
argument, and we also assume basic knowledge of the INSTALL utility. Otherwise, please look
at R’s help pages
?library
?INSTALL
before reading on.
A computing environment including a number of tools is assumed; the “R Installation and
Administration” manual describes what is needed. Under a Unix-alike most of the tools are
likely to be present by default, but Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X will require careful setup.
Once a source package is created, it must be installed by the command R CMD INSTALL. See
Section “Add-on-packages” in R Installation and Administration, for further details.
Other types of extensions are supported: See Section 1.11 [Package types], page 33.

1.1 Package structure
A package consists of a subdirectory containing a file ‘DESCRIPTION’ and the subdirectories ‘R’,
‘data’, ‘demo’, ‘exec’, ‘inst’, ‘man’, ‘po’, ‘src’, and ‘tests’ (some of which can be missing).
The package subdirectory may also contain files ‘INDEX’, ‘NAMESPACE’, ‘configure’, ‘cleanup’,
‘LICENSE’, ‘LICENCE’, ‘COPYING’ and ‘NEWS’. Other files such as ‘INSTALL’ (for non-standard
installation instructions), ‘README’ or ‘ChangeLog’ will be ignored by R, but may be useful to
end-users.
The ‘DESCRIPTION’ and ‘INDEX’ files are described in the sections below. The ‘NAMESPACE’
file is described in Section 1.6 [Package name spaces], page 22.
The optional files ‘configure’ and ‘cleanup’ are (Bourne shell) script files which are executed
before and (provided that option ‘--clean’ was given) after installation on Unix-alikes, see
Section 1.2 [Configure and cleanup], page 10. For use on Windows there may be analogues
‘configure.win’ and ‘cleanup.win’
The optional file ‘LICENSE’/‘LICENCE’ or ‘COPYING’ (where the former names are preferred)
contains a copy of the license to the package, e.g. a copy of the GNU public license. Whereas
you should feel free to include a license file in your source distribution, please do not arrange
to install yet another copy of the GNU ‘COPYING’ or ‘COPYING.LIB’ files but refer to the copies
on http://www.r-project.org/Licenses/ and included in the R distribution (in directory
‘share/licenses’).
For the conventions for files ‘NEWS’ and ‘ChangeLog’ in the GNU project see http://
www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#Documentation.
The package subdirectory should be given the same name as the package. Because some
file systems (e.g., those on Windows and by default on Mac OS X) are not case-sensitive, to
maintain portability it is strongly recommended that case distinctions not be used to distinguish
different packages. For example, if you have a package named ‘foo’, do not also create a package
named ‘Foo’.
To ensure that file names are valid across file systems and supported operating system plat-
forms, the ASCII control characters as well as the characters ‘"’, ‘*’, ‘:’, ‘/’, ‘<’, ‘>’, ‘?’, ‘’, and
‘|’ are not allowed in file names. In addition, files with names ‘con’, ‘prn’, ‘aux’, ‘clock$’, ‘nul’,
‘com1’ to ‘com9’, and ‘lpt1’ to ‘lpt9’ after conversion to lower case and stripping possible “ex-
tensions” (e.g., ‘lpt5.foo.bar’), are disallowed. Also, file names in the same directory must not


differ only by case (see the previous paragraph). In addition, the names of ‘.Rd’ files will be used
in URLs and so must be ASCII and not contain %. For maximal portability filenames should only
contain only ASCII characters not excluded already (that is A-Za-z0-9._!#$%&+,;=@^(){}’[]
we exclude space as many utilities do not accept spaces in file paths): non-English alphabetic
characters cannot be guaranteed to be supported in all locales. It would be good practice to
avoid the shell metacharacters (){}’[]$.
A source package if possible should not contain binary executable files: they are not portable,
and a security risk if they are of the appropriate architecture. R CMD check will warn about
them1 unless they are listed (one filepath per line) in a file ‘BinaryFiles’ at the top level of the
package. Note that CRAN will no longer accept submissions containing binary files even if they
are listed.
The R function package.skeleton can help to create the structure for a new package: see
its help page for details.

1.1.1 The ‘DESCRIPTION’ file
The ‘DESCRIPTION’ file contains basic information about the package in the following format:
¨
Package: pkgname
Version: 0.5-1
Date: 2004-01-01
Title: My First Collection of Functions
Author: Joe Developer Joe.Developer@some.domain.net, with
contributions from A. User A.User@whereever.net.
Maintainer: Joe Developer Joe.Developer@some.domain.net
Depends: R (= 1.8.0), nlme
Suggests: MASS
Description: A short (one paragraph) description of what
the package does and why it may be useful.
License: GPL (= 2)
URL: http://www.r-project.org, http://www.another.url
©
The format is that of a ‘Debian Control File’ (see the help for ‘read.dcf’). Continuation lines
(for example, for descriptions longer than one line) start with a space or tab. The ‘Package’,
‘Version’, ‘License’, ‘Description’, ‘Title’, ‘Author’, and ‘Maintainer’ fields are mandatory,
the remaining fields (‘Date’, ‘Depends’, ‘URL’, . . . ) are optional.
The ‘DESCRIPTION’ file should be written entirely in ASCII for maximal portability.
The ‘Package’ and ‘Version’ fields give the name and the version of the package, respectively.
The name should consist of letters, numbers, and the dot character and start with a letter. The
version is a sequence of at least two (and usually three) non-negative integers separated by single
‘.’ or ‘-’ characters. The canonical form is as shown in the example, and a version such as ‘0.01’
or ‘0.01.0’ will be handled as if it were ‘0.1-0’. (Translation packages are allowed names of
the form ‘Translation-ll ’.)
The ‘License’ field should specify the license of the package in the following standardized
form. Alternatives are indicated via vertical bars. Individual specifications must be one of
• One of the “standard” short specifications
GPL-2 GPL-3 LGPL-2 LGPL-2.1 LGPL-3 AGPL-3 Artistic-1.0 Artistic-2.0
as made available via http://www.r-project.org/Licenses/ and contained in subdirec-
tory ‘share/licenses’ of the R source or home directory.
• The names of abbreviations of free or open source software (FOSS, e.g.,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSS) licenses as contained in the license data
1
false positives are possible, but only one has been seen so far.


base in file ‘share/licenses/license.db’ in the R source or home directory, possibly (for
versioned licenses) followed by a version restriction of the form ‘(op v )’ with op one of the
comparison operators ‘’, ‘=’, ‘’, ‘=’, ‘==’, or ‘!=’ and v a numeric version specification
(strings of non-negative integers separated by ‘.’), possibly combined via ‘,’ (see below
for an example). For versioned licenses, one can also specify the name followed by the
version, or combine an existing abbreviation and the version with a ‘-’. Further free (see
http://www.fsf.org/licenses/license-list.html) or open software (see http://
www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php) licenses will be added to this data
base if necessary.
• One of the strings ‘file LICENSE’ or ‘file LICENCE’ referring to a file named ‘LICENSE’ or
‘LICENCE’ in the package (source and installation) top-level directory.
• The string ‘Unlimited’, meaning that there are no restrictions on distribution or use other
than those imposed by relevant laws.
If a package license extends a base FOSS license (e.g., using GPL-3 or AGPL-3 with an
attribution clause), the extension should be placed in file ‘LICENSE’ (or ‘LICENCE’), and the string
‘+ file LICENSE’ (or ‘+ file LICENCE’, respectively) should be appended to the corresponding
individual license specification.
Examples for standardized specifications include
License: GPL-2
License: GPL (= 2) | BSD
License: LGPL (= 2.0, 3) | Mozilla Public License
License: GPL-2 | file LICENCE
License: Artistic-1.0 | AGPL-3 + file LICENSE
Please note in particular that “Public domain” is not a valid license.
It is very important that you include this license information! Otherwise, it may not even be
legally correct for others to distribute copies of the package. Do not use the ‘License’ field for
copyright information: if needed, use a ‘Copyright’ field.
Please ensure that the license you choose also covers any system dependencies of your package:
it is particularly important that any restrictions on the use of such dependencies are evident to
people reading your ‘DESCRIPTION’ file.
The ‘Description’ field should give a comprehensive description of what the package does.
One can use several (complete) sentences, but only one paragraph.
The ‘Title’ field should give a short description of the package. Some package listings may
truncate the title to 65 characters in order to keep the overall size of the listing limited. It
should be capitalized, not use any markup, not have any continuation lines, and not end in a
period. Older versions of R used a separate file ‘TITLE’ for giving this information; this is now
defunct, and the ‘Title’ field in ‘DESCRIPTION’ is required.
The ‘Author’ field describes who wrote the package. It is a plain text field intended for
human readers, but not for automatic processing (such as extracting the email addresses of all
listed contributors).
The ‘Maintainer’ field should give a single name with a valid (RFC 2822) email address in
angle brackets (for sending bug reports etc.). It should not end in a period or comma.
The optional ‘Date’ field gives the release date of the current version of the package. It is
strongly recommended to use the yyyy-mm-dd format conforming to the ISO standard.
The optional ‘Depends’ field gives a comma-separated list of package names which this pack-
age depends on. The package name may be optionally followed by a comment in parentheses.
The comment should contain a comparison operator2 , whitespace and a valid version number).
2
only ‘=’ and ‘=’ were supported prior to R 2.7.0, and only ‘=’ is supported for package versions by
install.packages.


You can also use the special package name ‘R’ if your package depends on a certain version of
R. E.g., if the package works only with R version 2.4.0 or newer, include ‘R (= 2.4.0)’ in the
‘Depends’ field. Both library and the R package checking facilities use this field, hence it is
an error to use improper syntax or misuse the ‘Depends’ field for comments on other software
that might be needed. Other dependencies (external to the R system) should be listed in the
‘SystemRequirements’ field, possibly amplified in a separate ‘README’ file. The R INSTALL fa-
cilities check if the version of R used is recent enough for the package being installed, and the
list of packages which is specified will be attached (after checking version requirements) before
the current package, both when library is called and when preparing for lazy-loading.
As from R 2.7.0 a package (or ‘R’) can appear more than once in the ‘Depends’, but only
the first occurrence will be used in earlier versions of R. (Unfortunately all occurrences will be
checked, so only ‘=’ and ‘=’ can be used.)
The optional ‘Imports’ field lists packages whose name spaces are imported from but which
do not need to be attached. Name spaces accessed by the ‘::’ and ‘:::’ operators must be
listed here, or in ‘Suggests’ or ‘Enhances’ (see below). Ideally this field will include all the
standard packages that are used, and it is important to include S4-using packages (as their class
definitions can change and the ‘DESCRIPTION’ file is used to decide which packages to re-install
when this happens). Packages declared in the ‘Depends’ field should not also be in the ‘Imports’
field. Versions can be specified, but will not be checked when the namespace is loaded.
The optional ‘Suggests’ field uses the same syntax as ‘Depends’ and lists packages that
are not necessarily needed. This includes packages used only in examples or vignettes (see
Section 1.4 [Writing package vignettes], page 20), and packages loaded in the body of functions.
E.g., suppose an example from package foo uses a dataset from package bar. Then it is not
necessary to have bar for routine use of foo, unless one wants to execute the examples: it is nice
to have bar, but not necessary.
Finally, the optional ‘Enhances’ field lists packages “enhanced” by the package at hand, e.g.,
by providing methods for classes from these packages.
The general rules are
• Packages whose name space only is needed to load the package using library(pkgname )
must be listed in the ‘Imports’ field and not in the ‘Depends’ field.
• Packages that need to be attached to successfully load the package using library(pkgname )
must be listed in the ‘Depends’ field, only.
• All packages that are needed to successfully run R CMD check on the package must be listed
in one of ‘Depends’ or ‘Suggests’ or ‘Imports’.
In particular, large packages providing “only” data for examples or vignettes should be listed in
‘Suggests’ rather than ‘Depends’ in order to make lean installations possible.
Prior to R 2.9.0, adding version dependencies for packages only made sense for the ‘Depends’
field, as only library checks version requirements, and only for the packages it loads via the
‘Depends’ field. As from R 2.9.0 other dependencies are used by install.packages.
The optional ‘URL’ field may give a list of URLs separated by commas or whitespace, for
example the homepage of the author or a page where additional material describing the software
can be found. These URLs are converted to active hyperlinks in CRAN package listings.
Base and recommended packages (i.e., packages contained in the R source distribution or
available from CRAN and recommended to be included in every binary distribution of R) have
a ‘Priority’ field with value ‘base’ or ‘recommended’, respectively. These priorities must not
be used by other packages.
An optional ‘Collate’ field can be used for controlling the collation order for the R code
files in a package when these are concatenated into a single file upon installation from source.
The default is to try collating according to the ‘C’ locale. If present, the collate specification


must list all R code files in the package (taking possible OS-specific subdirectories into account,
see Section 1.1.3 [Package subdirectories], page 7) as a whitespace separated list of file paths
relative to the ‘R’ subdirectory. Paths containing white space or quotes need to be quoted.
An OS-specific collation field (‘Collate.unix’ or ‘Collate.windows’) will be used instead of
‘Collate’.
The optional ‘LazyLoad’ and ‘LazyData’ fields control whether the R objects and the datasets
(respectively) use lazy-loading: set the field’s value to ‘yes’ or ‘true’ for lazy-loading and ‘no’
or ‘false’ for no lazy-loading. (Capitalized values are also accepted.) If the package you are
writing uses the methods package, specify ‘LazyLoad: yes’.
The optional ‘ZipData’ field controls whether the automatic Windows build will zip up the
data directory or no: set this to ‘no’ if your package will not work with a zipped data directory.
If the ‘DESCRIPTION’ file is not entirely in ASCII it should contain an ‘Encoding’ field spec-
ifying an encoding. This is used as the encoding of the ‘DESCRIPTION’ file itself and of the ‘R’
and ‘NAMESPACE’ files, and as the default encoding of ‘.Rd’ files. The examples are assumed to
be in this encoding when running R CMD check. As from R 2.8.0 it is used for the encoding of
the CITATION file. Only encoding names latin1, latin2 and UTF-8 are known to be portable.
(Do not specify an encoding unless one is actually needed: doing so makes the package less
portable.)
The optional ‘OS_type’ field specifies the OS(es) for which the package is intended. If present,
it should be one of unix or windows, and indicates that the package can only be installed on a
platform with ‘.Platform$OS.type’ having that value.
The optional ‘Type’ field specifies the type of the package: see Section 1.11 [Package types],
page 33.
Note: There should be no ‘Built’ or ‘Packaged’ fields, as these are added by the
package management tools.
One can add subject classifications for the content of the package using the optional
fields ‘Classification/ACM’ (using the Computing Classification System of the Association
for Computing Machinery, http://www.acm.org/class/), ‘Classification/JEL’ (the Journal
of Economic Literature Classification System, http://www.aeaweb.org/journal/jel_class_
system.html), or ‘Classification/MSC’ (the Mathematics Subject Classification of the Amer-
ican Mathematical Society, http://www.ams.org/msc/). The subject classifications should be
comma-separated lists of the respective classification codes, e.g., ‘Classification/ACM: G.4,
H.2.8, I.5.1’.
Finally, an optional ‘Language’ field can be used to indicate if the package documen-
tation is not in English: this should be a comma-separated list of 2-letter ISO 639-1
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639-1) or 3-letter ISO 639-3 (http://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/ISO_639-3) language codes, or standard (not private use or grandfathered) IETF
language tags as currently defined by RFC 4646 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4646, see
also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IETF_language_tag).

1.1.2 The ‘INDEX’ file
The optional file ‘INDEX’ contains a line for each sufficiently interesting object in the package,
giving its name and a description (functions such as print methods not usually called explicitly
might not be included). Normally this file is missing, and the corresponding information is
automatically generated from the documentation sources (using Rdindex() from package tools)
when installing from source and when using the package builder (see Section 1.3 [Checking and
building packages], page 16).
Rather than editing this file, it is preferable to put customized information about the package
into an overview man page (see Section 2.1.4 [Documenting packages], page 41) and/or a vignette
(see Section 1.4 [Writing package vignettes], page 20).


1.1.3 Package subdirectories
The ‘R’ subdirectory contains R code files, only. The code files to be installed must start with
an ASCII (lower or upper case) letter or digit and have one of the extensions ‘.R’, ‘.S’, ‘.q’,
‘.r’, or ‘.s’. We recommend using ‘.R’, as this extension seems to be not used by any other
software. It should be possible to read in the files using source(), so R objects must be created
by assignments. Note that there need be no connection between the name of the file and the R
objects created by it. Ideally, the R code files should only directly assign R objects and definitely
should not call functions with side effects such as require and options. If computations are
required to create objects these can use code ‘earlier’ in the package (see the ‘Collate’ field)
plus, only if lazyloading is used, functions in the ‘Depends’ packages provided that the objects
created do not depend on those packages except via name space imports. (Packages without
namespaces will work under somewhat less restrictive assumptions.)
Two exceptions are allowed: if the ‘R’ subdirectory contains a file ‘sysdata.rda’ (a saved
image of R objects) this will be lazy-loaded into the name space/package environment – this is
intended for system datasets that are not intended to be user-accessible via data. Also, files
ending in ‘.in’ will be allowed in the ‘R’ directory to allow a ‘configure’ script to generate
suitable files.
Only ASCII characters (and the control characters tab, formfeed, LF and CR) should be
used in code files. Other characters are accepted in comments, but then the comments may
not be readable in e.g. a UTF-8 locale. Non-ASCII characters in object names will normally3
fail when the package is installed. Any byte will be allowed4 in a quoted character string (but
uxxxx escapes should not be used unless the package depends on R (= 2.10)), but non-ASCII
character strings may not be usable in some locales and may display incorrectly in others.
Various R functions in a package can be used to initialize and clean up. For packages without a
name space, these are .First.lib and .Last.lib. (See Section 1.6.3 [Load hooks], page 23, for
packages with a name space.) It is conventional to define these functions in a file called ‘zzz.R’.
If .First.lib is defined in a package, it is called with arguments libname and pkgname after
the package is loaded and attached. A common use is to call library.dynam inside .First.lib
to load compiled code: another use is to call those functions with side effects. If .Last.lib
exists in a package it is called (with argument the full path to the installed package) just before
the package is detached. It is uncommon to detach packages and rare to have a .Last.lib
function: one use is to call library.dynam.unload to unload compiled code.
The ‘man’ subdirectory should contain (only) documentation files for the objects in the pack-
age in R documentation (Rd) format. The documentation filenames must start with an ASCII
(lower or upper case) letter or digit and have the extension ‘.Rd’ (the default) or ‘.rd’. Further,
the names must be valid in ‘file://’ URLs, which means5 they must be entirely ASCII and
not contain ‘%’. See Chapter 2 [Writing R documentation files], page 35, for more information.
Note that all user-level objects in a package should be documented; if a package pkg contains
user-level objects which are for “internal” use only, it should provide a file ‘pkg-internal.Rd’
which documents all such objects, and clearly states that these are not meant to be called by
the user. See e.g. the sources for package grid in the R distribution for an example. Note that
packages which use internal objects extensively should hide those objects in a name space, when
they do not need to be documented (see Section 1.6 [Package name spaces], page 22).
Having a ‘man’ directory containing no documentation files may give an installation error.

3
This is true for OSes which implement the ‘C’ locale, unless lazy-loading is not used, in which case it would
fail if loaded in a ‘C’ locale. (Windows’ idea of the ‘C’ locale uses the WinAnsi charset.)
4
It is good practice to encode them as octal or hex escape sequences.
5
More precisely, they can contain the English alphanumeric characters and the symbols ‘$ - _ . + ! ’ ( ) , ;
= ’.


The ‘R’ and ‘man’ subdirectories may contain OS-specific subdirectories named ‘unix’ or
‘windows’.
The sources and headers for the compiled code are in ‘src’, plus optionally a file ‘Makevars’
or ‘Makefile’. When a package is installed using R CMD INSTALL, make is used to control compi-
lation and linking into a shared object for loading into R. There are default variables and rules
for this (determined when R is configured and recorded in ‘R_HOME /etcR_ARCH /Makeconf’),
providing support for C, C++, FORTRAN 77, Fortran 9x6 , Objective C and Objective C++7
with associated extensions ‘.c’, ‘.cc’ or ‘.cpp’ or ‘.C’, ‘.f’, ‘.f90’ or ‘.f95’, ‘.m’, and ‘.mm’ or
‘.M’, respectively. We recommend using ‘.h’ for headers, also for C++8 or Fortran 9x include
files.
It is not portable (and may not be possible at all) to mix all these languages in a single
package, and we do not support using both C++ and Fortran 9x. Because R itself uses it, we
know that C and FORTRAN 77 can be used together and mixing C and C++ seems to be widely
successful.
The default rules can be tweaked by setting macros in a file ‘src/Makevars’ (see Section 1.2.1
[Using Makevars], page 12). Note that this mechanism should be general enough to eliminate the
need for a package-specific ‘src/Makefile’. If such a file is to be distributed, considerable care
is needed to make it general enough to work on all R platforms. If it has any targets at all, it
should have an appropriate first target named ‘all’ and a (possibly empty) target ‘clean’ which
removes all files generated by Make (to be used by ‘R CMD INSTALL --clean’ and ‘R CMD INSTALL
--preclean’). There are platform-specific file names on Windows: ‘src/Makevars.win’ takes
precedence over ‘src/Makevars’ and ‘src/Makefile.win’ must be used.
The ‘data’ subdirectory is for data files: See Section 1.1.5 [Data in packages], page 9.
The ‘demo’ subdirectory is for R scripts (for running via demo()) that demonstrate some of
the functionality of the package. Demos may be interactive and are not checked automatically,
so if testing is desired use code in the ‘tests’ directory. The script files must start with a
(lower or upper case) letter and have one of the extensions ‘.R’ or ‘.r’. If present, the ‘demo’
subdirectory should also have a ‘00Index’ file with one line for each demo, giving its name and
a description separated by white space. (Note that it is not possible to generate this index file
automatically.)
The contents of the ‘inst’ subdirectory will be copied recursively to the installation directory.
Subdirectories of ‘inst’ should not interfere with those used by R (currently, ‘R’, ‘data’, ‘demo’,
‘exec’, ‘libs’, ‘man’, ‘help’, ‘html’, ‘latex’, ‘R-ex’ and ‘Meta’). The copying of the ‘inst’
happens after ‘src’ is built so its ‘Makefile’ can create files to be installed. Note that with the
exceptions of ‘INDEX’, ‘LICENSE’/‘LICENCE’, ‘COPYING’ and ‘NEWS’ (from R 2.7.0), information
files at the top level of the package will not be installed and so not be known to users of
Windows and Mac OS X compiled packages (and not seen by those who use R CMD INSTALL or
install.packages on the tarball). So any information files you wish an end user to see should
be included in ‘inst’.
One thing you might like to add to ‘inst’ is a ‘CITATION’ file for use by the citation
function. Note that if the named exceptions also occur in ‘inst’, the version in ‘inst’ will be
that seen in the installed package. If you want ‘NEWS’ to be installed by your package in earlier
versions of R, you need to include it in ‘inst’.

6
Note that Ratfor is not supported. If you have Ratfor source code, you need to convert it to FORTRAN. Only
FORTRAN-77 (which we write in upper case) is supported on all platforms, but most also support Fortran-95
(for which we use title case). If you want to ship Ratfor source files, please do so in a subdirectory of ‘src’
and not in the main subdirectory.
7
either or both of which may not be supported on particular platforms
8
Using ‘.hpp’, although somewhat popular, is not guaranteed to be portable.


Subdirectory ‘tests’ is for additional package-specific test code, similar to the specific tests
that come with the R distribution. Test code can either be provided directly in a ‘.R’ file, or via a
‘.Rin’ file containing code which in turn creates the corresponding ‘.R’ file (e.g., by collecting all
function objects in the package and then calling them with the strangest arguments). The results
of running a ‘.R’ file are written to a ‘.Rout’ file. If there is a corresponding ‘.Rout.save’ file,
these two are compared, with differences being reported but not causing an error. The directory
‘tests’ is copied to the check area, and the tests are run with the copy as the working directory
and with R_LIBS set to ensure that the copy of the package installed during testing will be found
by library(pkg_name ).
If ‘tests’ has a subdirectory ‘Examples’ containing a file pkg -Ex.Rout.save, this is com-
pared to the output file for running the examples when the latter are checked.
Subdirectory ‘exec’ could contain additional executables the package needs, typically scripts
for interpreters such as the shell, Perl, or Tcl. This mechanism is currently used only by a very
few packages, and still experimental.
Subdirectory ‘po’ is used for files related to localization: see Section 1.9 [Internationalization],
page 30.

1.1.4 Package bundles
Package bundles were deprecated in R 2.10.0 and support for installing them will be removed
in R 2.11.0.
Unbundling a package bundle is straightforward: just replace the ‘DESCRIPTION.in’ file of
each package by a suitable ‘DESCRIPTION’ file and distribute the individual packages (e.g. via
tarballs created by R CMD build)). The installed ‘DESCRIPTION’ files provide a good starting
point, but the ‘Bundle’, ‘Contains’ and ‘BundleDescription’ fields should not appear. It may
be needed to add references in the ‘Suggests’ or ‘Imports’ fields to other members of the former
bundle.
Prior to R 2.9.1, update.packages() will only update members of a bundle by an updated
bundle, whereas later versions of R will update one or more members if an updated package of
that name is available. Thus when a bundle is unbundled, updating is transparent in R 2.9.1
and later but needs to be done manually in earlier versions.

1.1.5 Data in packages
The ‘data’ subdirectory is for data files, either to be made available via lazy-loading or for
loading using data(). (The choice is made by the ‘LazyData’ field in the ‘DESCRIPTION’ file.)
It should not be used for other data files needed by the package, and the convention has grown
up to use directory ‘inst/extdata’ for such files.
Data files can have one of three types as indicated by their extension: plain R code (‘.R’ or
‘.r’), tables (‘.tab’, ‘.txt’, or ‘.csv’, see ?data for the file formats, and note that ‘.csv’ is not
the standard9 CSV format), or save() images (‘.RData’ or ‘.rda’). Note that R code should
be “self-sufficient” and not make use of extra functionality provided by the package, so that the
data file can also be used without having to load the package.
If your data files are enormous and you are not using ‘LazyData’ you can speed up installation
by providing a file ‘datalist’ in the ‘data’ subdirectory. This should have one line per topic
that data() will find, in the format ‘foo’ if data(foo) provides ‘foo’, or ‘foo: bar bah’ if
data(foo) provides ‘bar’ and ‘bah’.
As from R 2.10.0 tables (‘.tab’, ‘.txt’, or ‘.csv’ files) can be compressed by gzip, bzip2 or
xz, optionally with additional extension ‘.gz’, ‘.bz2’ or ‘.xz’.

9
e.g http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180.


If your package is to be distributed, do consider the resource implications for your users of
large datasets: they can make packages very slow to download and use up unwelcome amounts
of storage space, as well as taking many seconds to load. It is normally best to distribute
large datasets as ‘.rda’ images prepared by save(, compress = TRUE) (the default): there is no
excuse for distributing ASCII saves.
Using bzip2 or xz compression will usually reduce the size of both the package tarball and
the installed package, in some cases by a factor of two or more. However, such compression can
only be used with R 2.10.0 or later, and so the package should have an appropriate ‘Depends’
entry in its DESCRIPTION file.
Package tools has a couple of functions to help with data images: checkRdaFiles reports on
the way the image was saved, and resaveRdaFiles will re-save in a different type of compression,
including choosing the best type for that particular image.

1.2 Configure and cleanup
Note that most of this section is Unix-specific: see the comments later on about the Windows
port of R.
If your package needs some system-dependent configuration before installation you can in-
clude an executable (Bourne shell) script ‘configure’ in your package which (if present) is
executed by R CMD INSTALL before any other action is performed. This can be a script created
by the Autoconf mechanism, but may also be a script written by yourself. Use this to detect
if any nonstandard libraries are present such that corresponding code in the package can be
disabled at install time rather than giving error messages when the package is compiled or used.
To summarize, the full power of Autoconf is available for your extension package (including
variable substitution, searching for libraries, etc.).
Under a Unix-alike only, an executable (Bourne shell) script ‘cleanup’ is executed as last
thing by R CMD INSTALL if option ‘--clean’ was given, and by R CMD build when preparing the
package for building from its source. It can be used to clean up the package source tree. In
particular, it should remove all files created by configure.
As an example consider we want to use functionality provided by a (C or FORTRAN) library
foo. Using Autoconf, we can create a configure script which checks for the library, sets variable
HAVE_FOO to TRUE if it was found and with FALSE otherwise, and then substitutes this value into
output files (by replacing instances of ‘@HAVE_FOO@’ in input files with the value of HAVE_FOO).
For example, if a function named bar is to be made available by linking against library foo (i.e.,
using ‘-lfoo’), one could use
AC_CHECK_LIB(foo, fun, [HAVE_FOO=TRUE], [HAVE_FOO=FALSE])
AC_SUBST(HAVE_FOO)
......
AC_CONFIG_FILES([foo.R])
AC_OUTPUT
in ‘configure.ac’ (assuming Autoconf 2.50 or later).
The definition of the respective R function in ‘foo.R.in’ could be
foo - function(x) {
if(!@HAVE_FOO@)
stop(Sorry, library ’foo’ is not available))
...
From this file configure creates the actual R source file ‘foo.R’ looking like
foo - function(x) {
if(!FALSE)
stop(Sorry, library ’foo’ is not available))
...


if library foo was not found (with the desired functionality). In this case, the above R code
effectively disables the function.
One could also use different file fragments for available and missing functionality, respectively.
You will very likely need to ensure that the same C compiler and compiler flags are used in
the ‘configure’ tests as when compiling R or your package. Under Unix, you can achieve this
by including the following fragment early in ‘configure.ac’
: ${R_HOME=‘R RHOME‘}
if test -z ${R_HOME}; then
echo could not determine R_HOME
exit 1
fi
CC=‘${R_HOME}/bin/R CMD config CC‘
CFLAGS=‘${R_HOME}/bin/R CMD config CFLAGS‘
CPPFLAGS=‘${R_HOME}/bin/R CMD config CPPFLAGS‘
(using ‘${R_HOME}/bin/R’ rather than just ‘R’ is necessary in order to use the correct version of
R when running the script as part of R CMD INSTALL.)
Note that earlier versions of this document recommended obtaining the configure information
by direct extraction (using grep and sed) from ‘R_HOME /etcR_ARCH /Makeconf’, which only
works for variables recorded there as literals. You can use R CMD config for getting the value
of the basic configuration variables, or the header and library flags necessary for linking against
R, see R CMD config --help for details. (This works on Windows as from R 2.6.0.)
To check for an external BLAS library using the ACX_BLAS macro from the official Autoconf
Macro Archive, one can simply do
F77=‘${R_HOME}/bin/R CMD config F77‘
AC_PROG_F77
FLIBS=‘${R_HOME}/bin/R CMD config FLIBS‘
ACX_BLAS([], AC_MSG_ERROR([could not find your BLAS library], 1))
Note that FLIBS as determined by R must be used to ensure that FORTRAN 77 code works on
all R platforms. Calls to the Autoconf macro AC_F77_LIBRARY_LDFLAGS, which would overwrite
FLIBS, must not be used (and hence e.g. removed from ACX_BLAS). (Recent versions of Autoconf
in fact allow an already set FLIBS to override the test for the FORTRAN linker flags. Also,
recent versions of R can detect external BLAS and LAPACK libraries.)
You should bear in mind that the configure script will not be used on Windows systems. If
your package is to be made publicly available, please give enough information for a user on a
non-Unix platform to configure it manually, or provide a ‘configure.win’ script to be used on
that platform. (Optionally, there can be a ‘cleanup.win’ script. Both should be shell scripts
to be executed by ash, which is a minimal version of Bourne-style sh.)
In some rare circumstances, the configuration and cleanup scripts need to know the location
into which the package is being installed. An example of this is a package that uses C code
and creates two shared object/DLLs. Usually, the object that is dynamically loaded by R is
linked against the second, dependent, object. On some systems, we can add the location of
this dependent object to the object that is dynamically loaded by R. This means that each user
does not have to set the value of the LD_LIBRARY_PATH (or equivalent) environment variable,
but that the secondary object is automatically resolved. Another example is when a package
installs support files that are required at run time, and their location is substituted into an
R data structure at installation time. (This happens with the Java Archive files in the SJava
package.) The names of the top-level library directory (i.e., specifiable via the ‘-l’ argument)
and the directory of the package itself are made available to the installation scripts via the
two shell/environment variables R_LIBRARY_DIR and R_PACKAGE_DIR. Additionally, the name


of the package (e.g., ‘survival’ or ‘MASS’) being installed is available from the shell variable
R_PACKAGE_NAME.

1.2.1 Using ‘Makevars’
Sometimes writing your own ‘configure’ script can be avoided by supplying a file ‘Makevars’:
also one of the most common uses of a ‘configure’ script is to make ‘Makevars’ from
‘Makevars.in’.
The most common use of a ‘Makevars’ file is to set additional preprocessor options (for
example include paths) for C/C++ files via PKG_CPPFLAGS, and additional compiler flags by
setting PKG_CFLAGS, PKG_CXXFLAGS, PKG_FFLAGS and PKG_FCFLAGS, for C, C++, FORTRAN or
Fortran 9x respectively (see Section 5.5 [Creating shared objects], page 72).
‘Makevars’ can also be used to set flags for the linker, for example ‘-L’ and ‘-l’ options, via
PKG_LIBS.
When writing a ‘Makevars’ file for a package you intend to distribute, take care to ensure
that it is not specific to your compiler: flags such as ‘-O2 -Wall -pedantic’ are all specific to
GCC.
There are some macros which are built whilst configuring the building of R itself and are
stored in ‘R_HOME /etcR_ARCH /Makeconf’. That makefile is included as a ‘Makefile’ before
‘Makevars[.win]’, and so the macros it defines can be used in the latter. These include
FLIBS A macro containing the set of libraries need to link FORTRAN code. This may
need to be included in PKG_LIBS: it will normally be included automatically if the
package contains FORTRAN source files.
BLAS_LIBS
A macro containing the BLAS libraries used when building R. This may need to be
included in PKG_LIBS. Beware that if it is empty then the R executable will contain
all the double-precision and double-complex BLAS routines, but no single-precision
or complex routines. If BLAS_LIBS is included, then FLIBS also needs to be10 , as
most BLAS libraries are written at least partially in FORTRAN.
LAPACK_LIBS
A macro containing the LAPACK libraries (and paths where appropriate) used when
building R. This may need to be included in PKG_LIBS. It may point to a dynamic
library libRlapack which contains all the double-precision LAPACK routines as
well as those double-complex LAPACK and BLAS routines needed to build R, or it
may point to an external LAPACK library, or may be empty if an external BLAS
library also contains LAPACK.
[There is no guarantee that the LAPACK library will provide more than all the
double-precision and double-complex routines, and some do not provide all the aux-
iliary routines.]
For portability, the macros BLAS_LIBS and FLIBS should always be included after
LAPACK_LIBS.
SAFE_FFLAGS
A macro containing flags which are needed to circumvent over-optimization of
FORTRAN code: it is typically ‘-g -O2 -ffloat-store’ on ‘ix86’ platforms using
gfortran. Note that this is not an additional flag to be used as part of PKG_FFLAGS,
but a replacement for FFLAGS, and that it is intended for the FORTRAN-77 com-
piler ‘F77’ and not necessarily for the Fortran 90/95 compiler ‘FC’. See the example
later in this section.
10
at least on Unix-alikes: the Windows build currently resolves such dependencies to a static FORTRAN library
when ‘Rblas.dll’ is built.


Setting certain macros in ‘Makevars’ will prevent R CMD SHLIB setting them: in particular if
‘Makevars’ sets ‘OBJECTS’ it will not be set on the make command line. This can be useful in
conjunction with implicit rules to allow other types of source code to be compiled and included
in the shared object. Also, as from R 2.9.0 setting an empty value for ‘OBJECTS’ will prevent
the shared object / DLL from being made (possibly useful in conjunction with an all target as
described in the next paragraph).
Note that ‘Makevars’ should not normally contain targets, as it is included before the default
makefile and make is called with target all which is defined in the default makefile. If you
really need to circumvent that, use a suitable (phony) target all before any actual targets in
‘Makevars.[win]’: for example package fastICA has
PKG_LIBS = @BLAS_LIBS@

SLAMC_FFLAGS=$(R_XTRA_FFLAGS) $(FPICFLAGS) $(SHLIB_FFLAGS) $(SAFE_FFLAGS)

all: $(SHLIB)

slamc.o: slamc.f
$(F77) $(SLAMC_FFLAGS) -c -o slamc.o slamc.f
needed to ensure that the LAPACK routines find some constants without infinite looping. The
Windows equivalent is
all: $(SHLIB)

slamc.o: slamc.f
$(F77) $(SAFE_FFLAGS) -c -o slamc.o slamc.f
(since the other macros are all empty on that platform, and R’s internal BLAS is not used).
Note that the first target in ‘Makevars’ will be called, but for back-compatibility it is best named
all.
If you want to create and then link to a library, say using code in a subdirectory, use something
like
.PHONY: all mylibs

all: $(SHLIB)
$(SHLIB): mylibs

mylibs:
(cd subdir; make)
Be careful to create all the necessary dependencies, as there is a no guarantee that the depen-
dencies of all will be run in a particular order (and some of the CRAN build machines use
multiple CPUs and parallel makes).
It is sometimes useful to have a target ‘clean’ in ‘Makevars’ or ‘Makevars.win’: this will be
used by R CMD build.

1.2.1.1 Back-compatibility
The description above is for R 2.10.0 and later. In versions of R before 2.9.0 the mechanisms
used on Unix-alikes and Windows were completely separate and their operation differed in a
number of details. The current version was designed to be as compatible as possible with both.
On a Unix-alike the rules are unchanged.
On Windows prior to R 2.9.0 any file ‘Makevars.win’ or ‘Makevars’ was included in another
makefile after its targets, so the target made was always
all: before $(DLLNAME).dll after

## these targets are just here to allow packages to add to them.
before:


after:
This allows packages to set dependencies for targets all, before or after. Pretty complete
backwards compatibility can be obtained by having no targets, or by having the first target in
Makevars.win as
all: before $(SHLIB) after
omitting before or after if they are unused. Note however that this is not compatible with
the use of a parallel make.
Note that as from R 2.10.0 the first target in ‘Makevars[.win]’ will be called if there is one,
so for backwards compatibility this should be named ‘all’.
Some packages used undocumented macros under Windows, notably ‘DPKG’ (use R_PACKAGE_
DIR instead).

1.2.2 Configure example
It may be helpful to give an extended example of using a ‘configure’ script to create a
‘src/Makevars’ file: this is based on that in the RODBC package.
The ‘configure.ac’ file follows: ‘configure’ is created from this by running autoconf in
the top-level package directory (containing ‘configure.ac’).
AC_INIT([RODBC], 1.1.8) dnl package name, version

dnl A user-specifiable option
odbc_mgr=
AC_ARG_WITH([odbc-manager],
AC_HELP_STRING([--with-odbc-manager=MGR],
[specify the ODBC manager, e.g. odbc or iodbc]),
[odbc_mgr=$withval])

if test $odbc_mgr = odbc ; then
AC_PATH_PROGS(ODBC_CONFIG, odbc_config)
fi

dnl Select an optional include path, from a configure option
dnl or from an environment variable.
AC_ARG_WITH([odbc-include],
AC_HELP_STRING([--with-odbc-include=INCLUDE_PATH],
[the location of ODBC header files]),
[odbc_include_path=$withval])
RODBC_CPPFLAGS=-I.
if test [ -n $odbc_include_path ] ; then
RODBC_CPPFLAGS=-I. -I${odbc_include_path}
else
if test [ -n ${ODBC_INCLUDE} ] ; then
RODBC_CPPFLAGS=-I. -I${ODBC_INCLUDE}
fi
fi

dnl ditto for a library path
AC_ARG_WITH([odbc-lib],
AC_HELP_STRING([--with-odbc-lib=LIB_PATH],
[the location of ODBC libraries]),
[odbc_lib_path=$withval])
if test [ -n $odbc_lib_path ] ; then
LIBS=-L$odbc_lib_path ${LIBS}
else
if test [ -n ${ODBC_LIBS} ] ; then
LIBS=-L${ODBC_LIBS} ${LIBS}
else
if test -n ${ODBC_CONFIG}; then
odbc_lib_path=‘odbc_config --libs | sed s/-lodbc//‘
LIBS=${odbc_lib_path} ${LIBS}


fi
fi
fi

dnl Now find the compiler and compiler flags to use
: ${R_HOME=‘R RHOME‘}
if test -z ${R_HOME}; then
echo could not determine R_HOME
exit 1
fi
CC=‘${R_HOME}/bin/R CMD config CC‘
CPP=‘${R_HOME}/bin/R CMD config CPP‘
CFLAGS=‘${R_HOME}/bin/R CMD config CFLAGS‘
CPPFLAGS=‘${R_HOME}/bin/R CMD config CPPFLAGS‘
AC_PROG_CC
AC_PROG_CPP

if test -n ${ODBC_CONFIG}; then
RODBC_CPPFLAGS=‘odbc_config --cflags‘
fi
CPPFLAGS=${CPPFLAGS} ${RODBC_CPPFLAGS}

dnl Check the headers can be found
AC_CHECK_HEADERS(sql.h sqlext.h)
if test ${ac_cv_header_sql_h} = no ||
test ${ac_cv_header_sqlext_h} = no; then
AC_MSG_ERROR(ODBC headers sql.h and sqlext.h not found)
fi

dnl search for a library containing an ODBC function
if test [ -n ${odbc_mgr} ] ; then
AC_SEARCH_LIBS(SQLTables, ${odbc_mgr}, ,
AC_MSG_ERROR(ODBC driver manager ${odbc_mgr} not found))
else
AC_SEARCH_LIBS(SQLTables, odbc odbc32 iodbc, ,
AC_MSG_ERROR(no ODBC driver manager found))
fi

dnl for 64-bit ODBC need SQL[U]LEN, and it is unclear where they are defined.
AC_CHECK_TYPES([SQLLEN, SQLULEN], , , [# include sql.h])
dnl for unixODBC header
AC_CHECK_SIZEOF(long, 4)

dnl substitute RODBC_CPPFLAGS and LIBS
AC_SUBST(RODBC_CPPFLAGS)
AC_SUBST(LIBS)
AC_CONFIG_HEADERS([src/config.h])
dnl and do substitution in the src/Makevars.in and src/config.h
AC_CONFIG_FILES([src/Makevars])
AC_OUTPUT
where ‘src/Makevars.in’ would be simply
PKG_CPPFLAGS = @RODBC_CPPFLAGS@
PKG_LIBS = @LIBS@
A user can then be advised to specify the location of the ODBC driver manager files by
options like (lines broken for easier reading)
R CMD INSTALL
--configure-args=’--with-odbc-include=/opt/local/include
--with-odbc-lib=/opt/local/lib --with-odbc-manager=iodbc’
RODBC
or by setting the environment variables ODBC_INCLUDE and ODBC_LIBS.


1.2.3 Using F95 code
R assumes that source files with extension ‘.f’ are FORTRAN 77, and passes them to the
compiler specified by ‘F77’. On most but not all platforms that compiler will accept Fortran
90/95 code: some platforms have a separate Fortran 90/95 compiler and a few (typically older)
platforms have no Fortran 90/95 support.
This means that portable packages need to be written in correct FORTRAN 77, which
will also be valid Fortran 95. See http://developer.r-project.org/Portability.html for
reference resources. In particular, free source form F95 code is not portable.
On some systems an alternative F95 compiler is available: from the gcc family this might
be gfortran or g95. Configuring R will try to find a compiler which (from its name) appears
to be a Fortran 90/95 compiler, and set it in macro ‘FC’. Note that it does not check that such
a compiler is fully (or even partially) compliant with Fortran 90/95. Packages making use of
Fortran 90/95 features should use file extension ‘.f90’ or ‘.f95’ for the source files: the variable
PKG_FCFLAGS specifies any special flags to be used. There is no guarantee that compiled Fortran
90/95 code can be mixed with any other type of compiled code, nor that a build of R will have
support for such packages.

1.3 Checking and building packages
Before using these tools, please check that your package can be installed and loaded. R CMD
check will inter alia do this, but you may get more detailed error messages doing the checks
directly.

1.3.1 Checking packages
Using R CMD check, the R package checker, one can test whether source R packages work cor-
rectly. It can be run on one or more directories, or gzipped package tar archives11 with extension
‘.tar.gz’ or ‘.tgz’. This runs a series of checks, including
1. The package is installed. This will warn about missing cross-references and duplicate aliases
in help files.
2. The file names are checked to be valid across file systems and supported operating system
platforms.
3. The files and directories are checked for sufficient permissions (Unix only).
4. The files are checked for binary executables, using a suitable version of file if available.
(There may be rare false positives.)
5. The ‘DESCRIPTION’ file is checked for completeness, and some of its entries for correctness.
Unless installation tests are skipped, checking is aborted if the package dependencies cannot
be resolved at run time. (You may need to set R_LIBS if dependent packages are in a separate
library tree.) One check is that the package name is not that of a standard package, nor
one of the defunct standard packages (‘ctest’, ‘eda’, ‘lqs’, ‘mle’, ‘modreg’, ‘mva’, ‘nls’,
‘stepfun’ and ‘ts’). Another check is that all packages mentioned in library or requires
or from which the ‘NAMESPACE’ file imports or are called via :: or ::: are listed (in ‘Depends’,
‘Imports’, ‘Suggests’ or ‘Contains’): this is not an exhaustive check of the actual imports.
6. Available index information (in particular, for demos and vignettes) is checked for com-
pleteness.
7. The package subdirectories are checked for suitable file names and for not being empty. The
checks on file names are controlled by the option ‘--check-subdirs=value ’. This defaults
to ‘default’, which runs the checks only if checking a tarball: the default can be overridden
by specifying the value as ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Further, the check on the ‘src’ directory is only
11
This may require GNU tar: the command used can be set with environment variable TAR.


run if the package does not contain a ‘configure’ script (which corresponds to the value
‘yes-maybe’) and there is no ‘src/Makefile’ or ‘src/Makefile.in’.
To allow a ‘configure’ script to generate suitable files, files ending in ‘.in’ will be allowed
in the ‘R’ directory.
A warning is given for directory names that look like R package check directories – many
packages have been submitted to CRAN containing these.
8. The R files are checked for syntax errors. Bytes which are non-ASCII are reported as
warnings, but these should be regarded as errors unless it is known that the package will
always be used in the same locale.
9. It is checked that the package can be loaded, first with the usual default packages and then
only with package base already loaded. If the package has a namespace, it is checked if this
can be loaded in an empty session with only the base namespace loaded. (Namespaces and
packages can be loaded very early in the session, before the default packages are available,
so packages should work then.)
10. The R files are checked for correct calls to library.dynam (with no extension). In addition,
it is checked whether methods have all arguments of the corresponding generic, and whether
the final argument of replacement functions is called ‘value’. All foreign function calls (.C,
.Fortran, .Call and .External calls) are tested to see if they have a PACKAGE argument,
and if not, whether the appropriate DLL might be deduced from the name space of the
package. Any other calls are reported. (The check is generous, and users may want to
supplement this by examining the output of tools::checkFF(mypkg, verbose=TRUE),
especially if the intention were to always use a PACKAGE argument)
11. The Rd files are checked for correct syntax and meta data, including the presence of the
mandatory (name, alias, title and description) fields. The Rd name and title are
checked for being non-empty, and the keywords found are compared to the standard ones.
There is a check for missing cross-references (links).
12. A check is made for missing documentation entries, such as undocumented user-level objects
in the package.
13. Documentation for functions, data sets, and S4 classes is checked for consistency with the
corresponding code.
14. It is checked whether all function arguments given in usage sections of Rd files are docu-
mented in the corresponding arguments section.
15. C, C++ and FORTRAN source and header files are tested for portable (LF-only) line endings.
If there is a ‘Makefile’ or ‘Makefile.in’ or ‘Makevars’ or ‘Makevars.in’ in the ‘src’
directory, it is checked for portable line endings and the correct use of ‘$(BLAS_LIBS)’.
16. The examples provided by the package’s documentation are run. (see Chapter 2 [Writing R
documentation files], page 35, for information on using examples to create executable ex-
ample code.) If there is a file ‘tests/Examples/pkg-Ex.Rout.save’, the output of running
the examples is compared to that file.
Of course, released packages should be able to run at least their own examples. Each
example is run in a ‘clean’ environment (so earlier examples cannot be assumed to have
been run), and with the variables T and F redefined to generate an error unless they are set
in the example: See Section “Logical vectors” in An Introduction to R.
17. If the package sources contain a ‘tests’ directory then the tests specified in that directory
are run. (Typically they will consist of a set of ‘.R’ source files and target output files
‘.Rout.save’.) Please note that the comparison will be done in the end user’s locale,
so the target output files should be ASCII if at all possible – this may require using12
options(useFancyQuotes=FALSE) in the source files.
12
this is done automatically as from R 2.9.0.


18. The code in package vignettes (see Section 1.4 [Writing package vignettes], page 20) is
executed, and the vignettes made from the sources as a check of completeness.
19. If a working pdflatex or latex program is available, the ‘.pdf’ or ‘.dvi’ version, respec-
tively, of the package’s manual is created (to check that the Rd files can be converted
successfully).
Use R CMD check --help to obtain more information about the usage of the R package
checker. A subset of the checking steps can be selected by adding flags.
You do need to ensure that the package is checked in a suitable locale if it contains non-ASCII
characters. Such packages are likely to fail some of the checks in a C locale, and R CMD check
will warn if it spots the problem. You should be able to check any package in a UTF-8 locale
(if one is available). Beware that although a C locale is rarely used at a console, it may be the
default if logging in remotely or for batch jobs.

1.3.2 Building packages
Using R CMD build, the R package builder, one can build R packages from their sources (for
example, for subsequent release).
Prior to actually building the package in the standard gzipped tar file format, a few diagnostic
checks and cleanups are performed. In particular, it is tested whether object indices exist and
can be assumed to be up-to-date, and C, C++ and FORTRAN source files and relevant make
files are tested and converted to LF line-endings if necessary.
Run-time checks whether the package works correctly should be performed using R CMD check
prior to invoking the build procedure.
To exclude files from being put into the package, one can specify a list of exclude patterns in
file ‘.Rbuildignore’ in the top-level source directory. These patterns should be Perl regexps,
one per line, to be matched against the file names relative to the top-level source directory. In
addition, directories from source control systems13 , directories with names ending ‘.Rcheck’ or
‘Old’ or ‘old’ and files ‘GNUMakefile’, ‘Read-and-delete-me’ or with base names starting with
‘.#’, or starting and ending with ‘#’, or ending in ‘~’, ‘.bak’ or ‘.swp’, are excluded by default.
In addition, those files in the ‘R’, ‘demo’ and ‘man’ directories which are flagged by R CMD check
as having invalid names will be excluded.
Use R CMD build --help to obtain more information about the usage of the R package
builder.
Unless R CMD build is invoked with the ‘--no-vignettes’ option, it will attempt to rebuild
the vignettes (see Section 1.4 [Writing package vignettes], page 20) in the package. To do so it
installs the current package into a temporary library tree, but any dependent packages need to
be installed in an available library tree (see the Note: below).
One of the checks that R CMD build runs is for empty source directories. These are in most
cases unintentional, in which case they should be removed and the build re-run.
It can be useful to run R CMD check --check-subdirs=yes on the built tarball as a final
check on the contents.
R CMD build can also build pre-compiled version of packages for binary distributions, but R
CMD INSTALL --build is preferred (and is considerably more flexible).
Note: R CMD check and R CMD build run R with ‘--vanilla’, so none of the user’s
startup files are read. If you need R_LIBS set (to find packages in a non-standard
library) you will need to set it in the environment.
Note to Windows users: R CMD check and R CMD build need you to have installed
the files for building source packages (which is the default), as well as the Windows
13
called ‘CVS’ or ‘.svn’ or ‘.arch-ids’ or ‘.bzr’ or ‘.git’.


toolset and Perl (see the “R Installation and Administration” manual). You may
need to set TMPDIR to point to a suitable writable directory with a path not con-
taining spaces – use forward slashes for the separators. Also, the directory needs to
be on a case-honouring file system (some network-mounted file systems are not).

1.3.3 Customizing checking and building
In addition to the available command line options, R CMD check also allows customization by
setting (Perl) configuration variables in a configuration file, the location of which can be specified
via the ‘--rcfile’ option and defaults to ‘$HOME/.R/check.conf’ provided that the environ-
ment variable HOME is set.
The following configuration variables are currently available.
$R_check_use_install_log
If true, record the output from installing a package as part of its check to a log file
(‘00install.out’ by default), even when running interactively. Default: true.
$R_check_all_non_ISO_C
If true, do not ignore compiler (typically GCC) warnings about non ISO C code in
system headers. Default: false.
$R_check_weave_vignettes
If true, weave package vignettes in the process of checking them. Default: true.
$R_check_latex_vignettes
If true (and $R_check_weave_vignettes is also true), latex package vignettes in
the process of checking them: this will show up Sweave source errors, including
missing source files. Default: true.
$R_check_subdirs_nocase
If true, check the case of directories such as ‘R’ and ‘man’. Default: false.
$R_check_subdirs_strict
Initial setting for ‘--check-subdirs’. Default: ‘default’ (which checks only tar-
balls, and checks in the ‘src’ only if there is no ‘configure’ file).
$R_check_force_suggests
If true, give an error if suggested packages are not available. Default: true.
$R_check_use_codetools
If true, make use of the codetools package, which provides a detailed analysis of
visibility of objects (but may give false positives). Default: true.
$R_check_Rd_style
If true, check whether Rd usage entries for S3 methods use the full function name
rather than the appropriate method markup. Default: true.
$R_check_Rd_xrefs
If true, check the cross-references in ‘.Rd’ files. Default: true.
Values ‘1’ or a string with lower-cased version ‘yes’ or ‘true’ can be used for setting the
variables to true; similarly, ‘0’ or strings with lower-cased version ‘no’ or ‘false’ give false.
For example, a configuration file containing
$R_check_use_install_log = TRUE;
$R_check_weave_vignettes = 0;
results in using install logs and turning off weaving.
Future versions of R may enhance this customization mechanism, and provide a similar
scheme for R CMD build.


There are other internal settings that can be changed via environment variables _R_CHECK_*_:
See Section “Tools” in R Internals, (and the source code for check).

1.4 Writing package vignettes
In addition to the help files in Rd format, R packages allow the inclusion of documents in
arbitrary other formats. The standard location for these is subdirectory ‘inst/doc’ of a source
package, the contents will be copied to subdirectory ‘doc’ when the package is installed. Pointers
from package help indices to the installed documents are automatically created. Documents in
‘inst/doc’ can be in arbitrary format, however we strongly recommend to provide them in
PDF format, such that users on all platforms can easily read them. To ensure that they can
be accessed from a browser, the file names should start with an ASCII letter and be comprised
entirely of ASCII letters or digits or hyphen or underscore.
A special case are documents in Sweave format, which we call package vignettes. Sweave
allows the integration of L TEX documents and R code and is contained in package utils which
A
is part of the base R distribution, see the Sweave help page for details on the document format.
Package vignettes found in directory ‘inst/doc’ are tested by R CMD check by executing all R
code chunks they contain to ensure consistency between code and documentation. (Code chunks
with option eval=FALSE are not tested.) The R working directory for all vignette tests in R CMD
check is the installed version of the ‘doc’ subdirectory. Make sure all files needed by the vignette
(data sets, . . . ) are accessible by either placing them in the ‘inst/doc’ hierarchy of the source
package, or using calls to system.file().
R CMD build will automatically create PDF versions of the vignettes for distribution with the
package sources. By including the PDF version in the package sources it is not necessary that
the vignettes can be compiled at install time, i.e., the package author can use private L TEX A
14
extensions which are only available on his machine.
By default R CMD build will run Sweave on all files in Sweave format. If no ‘Makefile’
is found in directory ‘inst/doc’, then texi2dvi --pdf is run on all vignettes. Whenever a
‘Makefile’ is found, then R CMD build will try to run make after the Sweave step, so PDF
manuals can be created from arbitrary source formats (plain L TEX files, . . . ). The first target
A
in the ‘Makefile’ should take care of both creation of PDF files and cleaning up afterwards,
i.e., delete all files that shall not appear in the final package archive. Note that the make step is
executed independently from the presence of any files in Sweave format.
It is no longer necessary to provide a ‘00Index.dcf’ file in the ‘inst/doc’ directory—the
corresponding information is generated automatically from the VignetteIndexEntry state-
ments in all Sweave files when installing from source, or when using the package builder (see
Section 1.3 [Checking and building packages], page 16). The VignetteIndexEntry statement
is best placed in L TEX comment, as then no definition of the command is necessary.
A

At install time an HTML index for all vignettes is automatically created from the
VignetteIndexEntry statements unless a file ‘index.html’ exists in directory ‘inst/doc’.
This index is linked into the HTML help system for each package. If you do supply a
‘inst/doc/html/index.html’ file it should contain relative links only to files under the
installed ‘doc’ directory, or perhaps (not really an index) to HTML help files or to the
‘DESCRIPTION’ file.

1.5 Submitting a package to CRAN
CRAN is a network of WWW sites holding the R distributions and contributed code, especially
R packages. Users of R are encouraged to join in the collaborative project and to submit their
own packages to CRAN.
14
provided the conditions of the package’s licence are met: many would see this as incompatible with an Open
Source licence.


Before submitting a package mypkg, do run the following steps to test it is complete and will
install properly. (Run from the directory containing ‘mypkg ’ as a subdirectory.)
1. Run R CMD build to make the release ‘.tar.gz’ file.
2. Run R CMD check on the ‘.tar.gz’ file to check that the package will install and will run
its examples, and that the documentation is complete and can be processed. If the package
contains code that needs to be compiled, try to enable a reasonable amount of diagnostic
messaging (“warnings”) when compiling, such as e.g. ‘-Wall -pedantic’ for tools from
GCC, the Gnu Compiler Collection. If R was not configured accordingly, one can achieve
this via personal ‘Makevars’ files. See undefined [R-admin], page undefined ,
3. Study the outout from running your examples, in file ‘pkg.Rcheck/pkg-Ex.Rout’. Often
warnings there indicate actual errors, and warnings about your mistakes (which the R
developers are warning you that they are working around for you) will just annoy or confuse
your users.
If your package has tests, study their output too.
4. Look for any problems with help file conversions. For example, you should
• Read through the PDF manual that was produced by R CMD check at
‘mypkg.Rcheck/mypkg-manual.pdf’, or produce another copy by R CMD Rd2dvi --pdf
mypkg .
• Look at the rendering of your help pages in text from within R.
Many aspects of help rendering changed in R 2.10.0, and in particular the interpretation
of comment lines (which are rendered as blank lines, so do not put comment lines in the
middle of a paragraph of text). Also, the conversion does not currently expand tabs in ‘.Rd’
files, and this may need to be done manually.
Please ensure that you can run through the complete procedure with only warnings that you
understand and have reasons not to eliminate. In principle, packages must pass R CMD check
without warnings to be admitted to the main CRAN package area. If there are warnings you
cannot eliminate (for example because you believe them to be spurious) send an explanatory
note with your submission.
When all the testing is done, upload the ‘.tar.gz’ file, using ‘anonymous’ as log-in name and
your e-mail address as password, to ftp://CRAN.R-project.org/incoming/ (note: use ‘ftp’15
and not ‘sftp’ to connect to this server) and send a message to CRAN@R-project.org about it.
The CRAN maintainers will run these tests before putting a submission in the main archive.
Note also that for running L TEX, the Debian GNU/Linux CRAN check
A
systems use reasonably recent versions of the Debian TexLive distribution
(http://packages.debian.org/de/sid/texlive); for the Windows CRAN server, a
reasonably recent version of MikTeX (including all packages available directly for MikTeX) is
employed: the Mac OS X builders use a current full version of MacTeX. Developers wanting
to have their vignettes use TEX packages or style files not (yet) included in these distributions
should add the corresponding style files to the ‘inst/doc’ subdirectory of their package.
Note that CRAN does not accept submissions of precompiled binaries due to security concerns,
and does not allow binary executables in packages. Maintainers who need additional software
for the Windows binaries of their packages on CRAN have three options
1. To arrange for installation of the package to download the additional software from a URL,
as e.g. package Cairo does.
2. To negotiate with Uwe Ligges to host the additional components on WinBuilder, and write
a ‘configure.win’ file to install them. There are many examples, e.g. package rgdal.
15
for Windows users the simplest way may be to open that URL in Internet Explorer and (depending on the
version) follow the instructions to view it as a folder, then copy the submission to the folder.


3. To negotiate with Brian Ripley to host the package on CRAN extras, as was done for package
BRugs.
Be aware that in all cases license requirements will need to be met so you may need to supply
the sources for the additional components (and will if your package has a GPL-like license).

1.6 Package name spaces
R has a name space management system for packages. This system allows the package writer
to specify which variables in the package should be exported to make them available to package
users, and which variables should be imported from other packages.
The current mechanism for specifying a name space for a package is to place a ‘NAMESPACE’
file in the top level package directory. This file contains name space directives describing the
imports and exports of the name space. Additional directives register any shared objects to be
loaded and any S3-style methods that are provided. Note that although the file looks like R code
(and often has R-style comments) it is not processed as R code. Only very simple conditional
processing of if statements is implemented.
Like other packages, packages with name spaces are loaded and attached to the search path
by calling library. Only the exported variables are placed in the attached frame. Loading a
package that imports variables from other packages will cause these other packages to be loaded
as well (unless they have already been loaded), but they will not be placed on the search path
by these implicit loads.
Name spaces are sealed once they are loaded. Sealing means that imports and exports cannot
be changed and that internal variable bindings cannot be changed. Sealing allows a simpler
implementation strategy for the name space mechanism. Sealing also allows code analysis and
compilation tools to accurately identify the definition corresponding to a global variable reference
in a function body.
Note that adding a name space to a package changes the search strategy. The package name
space comes first in the search, then the imports, then the base name space and then the normal
search path.

1.6.1 Specifying imports and exports
Exports are specified using the export directive in the ‘NAMESPACE’ file. A directive of the form
export(f, g)
specifies that the variables f and g are to be exported. (Note that variable names may be
quoted, and reserved words and non-standard names such as [-.fractions must be.)
For packages with many variables to export it may be more convenient to specify the names
to export with a regular expression using exportPattern. The directive
exportPattern(^[^.])
exports all variables that do not start with a period.
A package with a name space implicitly imports the base name space. Variables exported from
other packages with name spaces need to be imported explicitly using the directives import and
importFrom. The import directive imports all exported variables from the specified package(s).
Thus the directives
import(foo, bar)
specifies that all exported variables in the packages foo and bar are to be imported. If only
some of the exported variables from a package are needed, then they can be imported using
importFrom. The directive
importFrom(foo, f, g)
specifies that the exported variables f and g of the package foo are to be imported.


It is possible to export variables from a name space that it has imported from other names-
paces.
If a package only needs a few objects from another package it can use a fully qualified variable
reference in the code instead of a formal import. A fully qualified reference to the function f
in package foo is of the form foo:::f. This is less efficient than a formal import and also loses
the advantage of recording all dependencies in the ‘NAMESPACE’ file, so this approach is usually
not recommended. Evaluating foo:::f will cause package foo to be loaded, but not attached,
if it was not loaded already—this can be an advantage is delaying the loading of a rarely used
package.
Using foo:::f allows access to unexported objects: to confine references to exported objects
use foo::f.

1.6.2 Registering S3 methods
The standard method for S3-style UseMethod dispatching might fail to locate methods defined
in a package that is imported but not attached to the search path. To ensure that these methods
are available the packages defining the methods should ensure that the generics are imported
and register the methods using S3method directives. If a package defines a function print.foo
intended to be used as a print method for class foo, then the directive
S3method(print, foo)
ensures that the method is registered and available for UseMethod dispatch. The function
print.foo does not need to be exported. Since the generic print is defined in base it does
not need to be imported explicitly. This mechanism is intended for use with generics that are
defined in a name space. Any methods for a generic defined in a package that does not use a
name space should be exported, and the package defining and exporting the methods should be
attached to the search path if the methods are to be found.
(Note that function and class names may be quoted, and reserved words and non-standard
names such as [- and function must be.)

1.6.3 Load hooks
There are a number of hooks that apply to packages with name spaces. See help(.onLoad)
for more details.
Packages with name spaces do not use the .First.lib function. Since loading and attach-
ing are distinct operations when a name space is used, separate hooks are provided for each.
These hook functions are called .onLoad and .onAttach. They take the same arguments as
.First.lib; they should be defined in the name space but not exported.
However, packages with name spaces do use the .Last.lib function. There is also a hook
.onUnload which is called when the name space is unloaded (via a call to unloadNamespace)
with argument the full path to the installed package’s directory. .onUnload should be defined
in the name space and not exported, but .Last.lib does need to be exported.
Packages are not likely to need .onAttach (except perhaps for a start-up banner); code to
set options and load shared objects should be placed in a .onLoad function, or use made of the
useDynLib directive described next.
There can be one or more useDynLib directives which allow shared objects that need to be
loaded to be specified in the ‘NAMESPACE’ file. The directive
useDynLib(foo)
registers the shared object foo for loading with library.dynam. Loading of registered object(s)
occurs after the package code has been loaded and before running the load hook function. Pack-
ages that would only need a load hook function to load a shared object can use the useDynLib
directive instead.


User-level hooks are also available: see the help on function setHook.
The useDynLib directive also accepts the names of the native routines that are to be used in
R via the .C, .Call, .Fortran and .External interface functions. These are given as additional
arguments to the directive, for example,
useDynLib(foo, myRoutine, myOtherRoutine)
By specifying these names in the useDynLib directive, the native symbols are resolved when
the package is loaded and R variables identifying these symbols are added to the package’s name
space with these names. These can be used in the .C, .Call, .Fortran and .External calls
in place of the name of the routine and the PACKAGE argument. For instance, we can call the
routine myRoutine from R with the code
.Call(myRoutine, x, y)
rather than
.Call(myRoutine, x, y, PACKAGE = foo)
There are at least two benefits to this approach. Firstly, the symbol lookup is done just once
for each symbol rather than each time it the routine is invoked. Secondly, this removes any
ambiguity in resolving symbols that might be present in several compiled DLLs.
In some circumstances, there will already be an R variable in the package with the same name
as a native symbol. For example, we may have an R function in the package named myRoutine.
In this case, it is necessary to map the native symbol to a different R variable name. This can
be done in the useDynLib directive by using named arguments. For instance, to map the native
symbol name myRoutine to the R variable myRoutine_sym, we would use
useDynLib(foo, myRoutine_sym = myRoutine, myOtherRoutine)
We could then call that routine from R using the command
.Call(myRoutine_sym, x, y)
Symbols without explicit names are assigned to the R variable with that name.
In some cases, it may be preferable not to create R variables in the package’s name space
that identify the native routines. It may be too costly to compute these for many routines
when the package is loaded if many of these routines are not likely to be used. In this case,
one can still perform the symbol resolution correctly using the DLL, but do this each time the
routine is called. Given a reference to the DLL as an R variable, say dll, we can call the routine
myRoutine using the expression
.Call(dll$myRoutine, x, y)
The $ operator resolves the routine with the given name in the DLL using a call to
getNativeSymbol. This is the same computation as above where we resolve the symbol when the
package is loaded. The only difference is that this is done each time in the case of dll$myRoutine.
In order to use this dynamic approach (e.g., dll$myRoutine), one needs the reference to the
DLL as an R variable in the package. The DLL can be assigned to a variable by using the
variable = dllName format used above for mapping symbols to R variables. For example, if
we wanted to assign the DLL reference for the DLL foo in the example above to the variable
myDLL, we would use the following directive in the ‘NAMESPACE’ file:
myDLL = useDynLib(foo, myRoutine_sym = myRoutine, myOtherRoutine)
Then, the R variable myDLL is in the package’s name space and available for calls such as
myDLL$dynRoutine to access routines that are not explicitly resolved at load time.
If the package has registration information (see Section 5.4 [Registering native routines],
page 70), then we can use that directly rather than specifying the list of symbols again in
the useDynLib directive in the ‘NAMESPACE’ file. Each routine in the registration information
is specified by giving a name by which the routine is to be specified along with the address
of the routine and any information about the number and type of the parameters. Using the


.registration argument of useDynLib, we can instruct the name space mechanism to create R
variables for these symbols. For example, suppose we have the following registration information
for a DLL named myDLL:
R_CMethodDef cMethods[] = {
{foo, foo, 4, {REALSXP, INTSXP, STRSXP, LGLSXP}},
{bar_sym, bar, 0},
{NULL, NULL, 0}
};

R_CallMethodDef callMethods[] = {
{R_call_sym, R_call, 4},
{R_version_sym, R_version, 0},
{NULL, NULL, 0}
};
Then, the directive in the ‘NAMESPACE’ file
useDynLib(myDLL, .registration = TRUE)
causes the DLL to be loaded and also for the R variables foo, bar_sym, R_call_sym and R_
version_sym to be defined in the package’s name space.
Note that the names for the R variables are taken from the entry in the registration informa-
tion and do not need to be the same as the name of the native routine. This allows the creator
of the registration information to map the native symbols to non-conflicting variable names in
R, e.g. R_version to R_version_sym for use in an R function such as
R_version - function()
{
.Call(R_version_sym)
}
Using argument .fixes allows an automatic prefix to be added to the registered symbols,
which can be useful when working with an existing package. For example, package KernSmooth
has
useDynLib(KernSmooth, .registration = TRUE, .fixes = F_)
which makes the R variables corresponding to the FORTRAN symbols F_bkde and so on, and
so avoid clashes with R code in the name space.
More information about this symbol lookup, along with some approaches for customizing it,
is available from http://www.omegahat.org/examples/RDotCall.

1.6.4 An example
As an example consider two packages named foo and bar. The R code for package foo in file
‘foo.R’ is
¨
x - 1
f - function(y) c(x,y)
foo - function(x) .Call(foo, x, PACKAGE=foo)
print.foo - function(x, ...) cat(a foon)
©

Some C code defines a C function compiled into DLL foo (with an appropriate extension). The
‘NAMESPACE’ file for this package is

¨
useDynLib(foo)
export(f, foo)
S3method(print, foo)
©
The second package bar has code file ‘bar.R’
¨
c - function(...) sum(...)
g - function(y) f(c(y, 7))
h - function(y) y+9
©
and ‘NAMESPACE’ file
¨
import(foo)
export(g, h)
©
Calling library(bar) loads bar and attaches its exports to the search path. Package foo is also
loaded but not attached to the search path. A call to g produces
g(6)
[1] 1 13
This is consistent with the definitions of c in the two settings: in bar the function c is defined
to be equivalent to sum, but in foo the variable c refers to the standard function c in base.

1.6.5 Summary – converting an existing package
To summarize, converting an existing package to use a name space involves several simple steps:
• Identify the public definitions and place them in export directives.
• Identify S3-style method definitions and write corresponding S3method declarations.
• Identify dependencies and replace any require calls by import directives (and make ap-
propriate changes in the Depends and Imports fields of the ‘DESCRIPTION’ file).
• Replace .First.lib functions with .onLoad functions or useDynLib directives.

1.6.6 Name spaces with S4 classes and methods
Some additional steps are needed for packages which make use of formal (S4-style) classes and
methods (unless these are purely used internally). The package should have Depends: methods
in its ‘DESCRIPTION’ file and any classes and methods which are to be exported need to be
declared in the ‘NAMESPACE’ file. For example, the stats4 package has
export(mle)
importFrom(graphics, plot)
importFrom(stats, AIC, coef, confint, logLik, optim, profile,
qchisq, update, vcov)
exportClasses(mle, profile.mle, summary.mle)
exportMethods(BIC, coef, confint, logLik, plot, profile,
summary, show, update, vcov)
export(AIC)
All S4 classes need to be listed in an exportClasses directive. Alternatively, a pattern can
be specified using exportClassPattern. Generics for which S4 methods are defined need to
be declared in an exportMethods directive, and where the generics are formed by taking over
existing functions, those functions need to be imported (explicitly unless they are defined in the
base name space).
Note that exporting methods on a generic in the namespace will also export the generic, and
exporting a generic in the namespace will also export its methods. Where a generic has been


created in the package solely to add S4 methods to it, it can be declared via either or both
of exports or exportMethods, but the latter seems clearer (and is used in the stats4 example
above). On the other hand, where a generic is created in a package without setting any methods
for it (such as AIC in stats4), exports must be used.
Further, a package using classes and methods defined in another package needs to import
them, with directives
importClassesFrom(package, ...)
importMethodsFrom(package, ...)
listing the classes and functions with methods respectively. Suppose we had two small packages
A and B with B using A. Then they could have NAMESPACE files
¨
export(f1, ng1)
exportMethods([)
exportClasses(c1)
©
and
¨
importFrom(A, ng1)
importClassesFrom(A, c1)
importMethodsFrom(A, f1)
export(f4, f5)
exportMethods(f6, [)
exportClasses(c1, c2)
©
respectively.
Note that importMethodsFrom will also import any generics defined in the namespace on
those methods.
If your package imports the whole of a name space, it will automatically import the classes
from that namespace. It will also import methods, but it is best to do so explicitly, especially
where there are methods being imported from more than one namespace.

1.7 Writing portable packages
Portable packages should have simple file names: use only alphanumeric ASCII characters and
., and avoid those names not allowed under Windows which are mentioned above.
R CMD check provides a basic set of checks, but often further problems emerge when people
try to install and use packages submitted to CRAN – many of these involve compiled code. Here
are some further checks that you can do to make your package more portable.
• If your package has a ‘configure’ script, provide a ‘configure.win’ script to be used on
Windows. The CRAN binary packages for Windows are built automatically, and if your
package does not build without intervention it is unlikely to be easily available to a high
proportion of R users.
• Make use of the abilities of your compilers to check the standards-conformance of your code.
For example, gcc can be used with options ‘-Wall -pedantic’ to alert you to potential
problems. Do not be tempted to assume that these are pure pedantry: for example R is
still used on platforms where the C compiler does not accept C++/C99 comments (starting
//).
If you use FORTRAN, ftnchek (http://www.dsm.fordham.edu/~ftnchek/) provides
thorough testing of conformance to the standard.


• Do be very careful with passing arguments between R, C and FORTRAN code. In particular,
long in C will be 32-bit on most R platforms (including those mostly used by the CRAN
maintainers), but 64-bit on many modern Unix and Linux platforms. It is rather unlikely
that the use of long in C code has been thought through: if you need a longer type than
int you should use a configure test for a C99 type such as int_fast64_t (and failing that,
long long) and typedef your own type to be long or long long, or use another suitable
type (such as size_t). Note that integer in FORTRAN corresponds to int in C on all R
platforms.
• Errors in memory allocation and reading/writing outside arrays are very common causes of
crashes (e.g., segfaults) on some machines. See Section 4.3.2 [Using valgrind], page 62 for a
tool which can be used to look for this.
• Many platforms will allow unsatisfied entry points in compiled code, but will crash the
application (here R) if they are ever used. Some (notably Windows) will not. Looking at
the output of
nm -pg mypkg.so # or other extension such as ‘.sl’ or ‘.dylib’
and checking if any of the symbols marked U is unexpected is a good way to avoid this.
• Conflicts between symbols in DLLs are handled in very platform-specific ways. Good ways
to avoid trouble are to make as many symbols as possible static (check with nm -pg), and
to use unusual names, as well as ensuring you have used the PACKAGE argument that R CMD
check checks for.

1.7.1 Encoding issues
Care is needed if your package contains non-ASCII text, and in particular if it is intended to be
used in more than one locale. It is possible to mark the encoding used in the ‘DESCRIPTION’ file
and in ‘.Rd’ files, as discussed elsewhere in this manual. What was not possible before R 2.5.0
was to mark the encoding used by character strings in R: if you want your package to work with
earlier versions of R please consult the advice in the R 2.4.x version of this manual.
First, consider carefully if you really need non-ASCII text. Most users of R will only be able
to view correctly text in their native language group (e.g. Western European, Eastern European,
Simplified Chinese) and ASCII. Other characters may not be rendered at all, rendered incorrectly,
or cause your R code to give an error. For documentation, marking the encoding and including
ASCII transliterations is likely to do a reasonable job.
Function showNonASCII in package tools can help in finding non-ASCII bytes in files.
The most favourable circumstance is using UTF-8-encoded text in a package that will only
ever be used in a UTF-8 locale (and hence not on Windows, for example). In that case it is likely
that text will be rendered correctly in the terminal/console used to run R, and files written will
be readable by other UTF-8-aware applications. However, plotting will be problematic. On-
screen plotting using the ‘X11()’ device needs to find a font that covers the glyphs used, and this
will be machine-dependent: you may have Russian or Japanese fonts installed but your users
may not. Using ‘postscript’ or ‘pdf’ will choose a default 8-bit encoding depending on the
language of the UTF-8 locale, and your users would need to be told how to select the ‘encoding’
argument. As from R 2.7.0 UTF-8-encoded text works reasonably well on Windows using the
Rgui console and the windows family of devices, since they work internally in Unicode (UCS-2).
Another fairly common scenario is where a package will only be used in one language, e.g.
French. It is not very safe to assume that all such users would have their computers set to a
French locale, but let us assume so. The problem then is that there are several possible encodings
for French locales, the most common ones being ‘CP1252’ (Windows), ‘ISO 8859-1’ (latin-1),
‘ISO 8859-15’ (latin-9 which includes the Euro), and ‘UTF-8’. For characters in the French
language the first three agree, but they do not agree with ‘UTF-8’. Further, you (or different
users of your machine) can run R in different locales in different sessions, say ‘fr_CA.utf8’ one


day and ‘fr_CH.iso88591’ the next. Declaring the encoding as either ‘latin1’ or ‘UTF-8’ in
the ‘DESCRIPTION’ file will enable this to work. If you have character data in ‘.rda’ files (for
use by data or LazyData) these need to have been prepared and saved in R 2.5.0 or later in an
appropriate locale (or marked via Encoding). For example (from package FactoMineR version
1.02):
library(FactoMineR)
data(wine)
Encoding(names(wine)) - latin1
Encoding(levels(wine$Terroir)) - latin1
save(wine, file=wine.rda)
was used to update a ‘.rda’ file.
From R 2.10.0 there is a fairly portable16 way to have arbitrary text in character strings
(only) in your R code, which is to supply them in Unicode as uxxxx escapes. If there are any
characters not in the current encoding the parser will encode the character string as UTF-8 and
mark it as such. A variation of this approach that has worked for Latin-1 text since R 2.5.0 is
to enter the text with x escapes and using Encoding(x) - latin1 to declare its encoding,
but that may not work in future versions of R.
If you want to run R CMD check on a Unix-alike over a package that sets the encoding you may
need to specify a suitable locale via environment variable R_ENCODING_LOCALES. The default is
equivalent to the value
latin1=en_US:latin2=pl_PL:UTF-8=en_US.utf8:latin9=fr_FR.iso885915@euro
(which is appropriate for a system based on glibc) except that if the current locale is UTF-8
when the package code is translated to UTF-8 for syntax checking.

1.8 Diagnostic messages
Now that diagnostic messages can be made available for translation, it is important to write
them in a consistent style. Using the tools described in the next section to extract all the
messages can give a useful overview of your consistency (or lack of it).
Some guidelines follow.
• Messages are sentence fragments, and not viewed in isolation. So it is conventional not to
capitalize the first word and not to end with a period (or other punctuation).
• Try not to split up messages into small pieces. In C error messages use a single format
string containing all English words in the messages.
In R error messages do not construct a message with paste (such messages will not be
translated) but via multiple arguments to stop or warning, or via gettextf.
• Do not use colloquialisms such as “can’t” and “don’t”.
• If possible, make quotation marks part of your message as different languages have different
conventions. In R messages this means not using sQuote or dQuote except where the
argument is a variable.
Conventionally single quotation marks are used for quotations such as
’ord’ must be a positive integer, at most the number of knots
and double quotation marks when referring to an R character string such as
’format’ must be normal or short - using normal
Since ASCII does not contain directional quotation marks, it is best to use ‘’’ and let the
translator (including automatic translation) use directional quotations where available. The
range of quotation styles is immense: unfortunately we cannot reproduce them in a portable
16
this has worked on Windows since R 2.7.0, and works now on all platforms.


texinfo document. But as a taster, some languages use ‘up’ and ‘down’ (comma) quotes
rather than left or right quotes, and some use guillemets (and some use what Adobe calls
‘guillemotleft’ to start and others use it to end).
• Occasionally messages need to be singular or plural (and in other languages there may be
no such concept or several plural forms – Slovenian has four). So avoid constructions such
as was once used in library
if((length(nopkgs) 0) !missing(lib.loc)) {
if(length(nopkgs) 1)
warning(libraries ,
paste(sQuote(nopkgs), collapse = , ),
contain no packages)
else
warning(library , paste(sQuote(nopkgs)),
contains no package)
}
and was replaced by
if((length(nopkgs) 0) !missing(lib.loc)) {
pkglist - paste(sQuote(nopkgs), collapse = , )
msg - sprintf(ngettext(length(nopkgs),
library %s contains no packages,
libraries %s contain no packages),
pkglist)
warning(msg, domain=NA)
}
Note that it is much better to have complete clauses as here, since in another language one
might need to say ‘There is no package in library %s’ or ‘There are no packages in libraries
%s’.

1.9 Internationalization
There are mechanisms to translate the R- and C-level error and warning messages. There are
only available if R is compiled with NLS support (which is requested by configure option
‘--enable-nls’, the default).
The procedures make use of msgfmt and xgettext which are part of GNU gettext and
this will need to be installed: Windows users can find pre-compiled binaries at the GNU
archive mirrors and packaged with the poEdit package (http://poedit.sourceforge.net/
download.php#win32).

1.9.1 C-level messages
The process of enabling translations is
• In a header file that will be included in all the C files containing messages that should be
translated, declare
#include R.h /* to include Rconfig.h */

#ifdef ENABLE_NLS
#include libintl.h
#define _(String) dgettext (pkg , String)
/* replace pkg as appropriate */
#else
#define _(String) (String)
#endif


• For each message that should be translated, wrap it in _(...), for example
error(_(’ord’ must be a positive integer));
If you want to use different messages for singular and plural forms, you need to add
#ifndef ENABLE_NLS
#define dngettext(pkg, String, StringP, N) (N 1 ? StringP: String)
#endif
and mark strings by
dngettext((pkg , singular string, plural string, n)
(This is only supported as from R 2.10.0, and will not work on Windows for earlier versions
of R.)
• In the package’s ‘src’ directory run
xgettext --keyword=_ -o pkg.pot *.c
The file ‘src/pkg.pot’ is the template file, and conventionally this is shipped as ‘po/pkg.pot’.
A translator to another language makes a copy of this file and edits it (see the gettext manual)
to produce say ‘ll.po’, where ll is the code for the language in which the translation is to be used.
(This file would be shipped in the ‘po’ directory.) Next run msgfmt on ‘ll.po’ to produce ‘ll.mo’,
and copy that to ‘inst/po/ll /LC_MESSAGES/pkg.mo’. Now when the package is loaded after
installation it will look for translations of its messages in the ‘po/lang /LC_MESSAGES/pkg.mo’
file for any language lang that matches the user’s preferences (via the setting of the LANGUAGE
environment variable or from the locale settings).

1.9.2 R messages
Mechanisms to support the automatic translation of R stop, warning and message messages
are in place, most easily if the package has a name space. They make use of message catalogs
in the same way as C-level messages, but using domain R-pkg rather than pkg . Translation
of character strings inside stop, warning and message calls is automatically enabled, as well
as other messages enclosed in calls to gettext or gettextf. (To suppress this, use argument
domain=NA.)
Tools to prepare the ‘R-pkg.pot’ file are provided in package tools: xgettext2pot will
prepare a file from all strings occurring inside gettext/gettextf, stop, warning and message
calls. Some of these are likely to be spurious and so the file is likely to need manual editing.
xgettext extracts the actual calls and so is more useful when tidying up error messages.
Translation of messages which might be singular or plural can be very intricate: languages
can have up to four different forms. The R function ngettext provides an interface to the
C function of the same name, and will choose an appropriate singular or plural form for the
selected language depending on the value of its first argument n.
Packages without name spaces will need to use domain=R-pkg explicitly in calls to stop,
warning, message, gettext/gettextf and ngettext.

1.9.3 Installing translations
Once the template files have been created, translations can be made. Conventional translations
have file extension ‘.po’ and are placed in the ‘po’ subdirectory of the package with a name that
is either ‘ll.po’ or ‘R-ll.po’ for translations of the C and R messages respectively to language
with code ‘ll ’.
See Section “Customizing package compilation” in R Installation and Administration, for
details of language codes.
Translations need to be prepared and installed in ‘inst/po/’ to be usable once the package
is installed. To do this use the appropriate lines of


mkdir -p inst/po/ll /LC_MESSAGES
msgfmt -c --statistics -o inst/po/ll /LC_MESSAGES/R-pkg.mo po/R-ll.po
msgfmt -c --statistics -o inst/po/ll /LC_MESSAGES/pkg.mo po/ll.po
from the package’s top-level directory. Using ‘-c’ does some useful validity checks, and
‘--statistics’ notes the coverage.

1.9.4 Makefile support
As from R 2.10.0 there is some makefile support in the ‘po’ directory of the R sources. To use
this to create the template files, use
mkdir -p pkgdir /po
where ‘pkgdir ’ is the top-level directory of the package sources. If the package has C source
files in its ‘src’ directory that are marked for translation, use
touch pkgdir /po/pkg.pot
to create a dummy template file. Then
cd R_BUILD_DIR /po
make pkg-update PKG=pkg PKGDIR=pkgdir
will create a template file of R messages and update any template of C messages. It will also
prepare and install a translation for the ‘en@quot’ pseudo-language, which if selected interprets
(single and double) quotes in their directional forms in suitable (e.g. UTF-8) locales.
If translations to new languages are added in the ‘pkgdir /po’ directory, running the same
make command will check and then install the translations.
If the package sources are updated, the same make command will update the template files,
merge the changes into the translation ‘.po’ files and then installed the updated translations.
You will often see that merging marks translations as ‘fuzzy’ and this is reported in the coverage
statistics. As fuzzy translations are not used, this is an indication that the translation files need
human attention.
This support is only for Unix-alikes, and the tools did not work correctly on at least one Mac
OS X system.

1.10 CITATION files
An installed file named ‘CITATION’ will be used by the citation() function. (To be installed,
it needed to be in the ‘inst’ subdirectory of the package sources.)
The ‘CITATION’ file is parsed as R code (in the package’s declared encoding17 , defaulting to
latin-1). If no such file is present, citation generates a standard contents, and an example of
what that would look like as a ‘CITATION’ file can be seen in recommended package nlme (see
below): recommended packages boot, cluster and mgcv have further examples.
A ‘CITATION’ file will contain calls to the functions citHeader, citEntry and (optionally)
citFooter. Here is that for nlme, re-formatted:
citHeader(To cite package ’nlme’ in publications use:)

desc - packageDescription(nlme)
year - sub(.*(2[[:digit:]]{3})-.*, 1, desc$Date)
vers - paste(R package version, desc$Version)

citEntry(entry=Manual,
title = nlme: Linear and Nonlinear Mixed Effects Models,
17
as from R 2.8.0: R 2.7.x read it in latin-1, and earlier versions in the current encoding of the R session


author = personList(as.person(Jose Pinheiro),
as.person(Douglas Bates),
as.person(Saikat DebRoy),
as.person(Deepayan Sarkar),
as.person(the R Core team)),
year = year,
note = vers,

textVersion =
paste(Jose Pinheiro, Douglas Bates, Saikat DebRoy,,
Deepayan Sarkar and the R Core team (,
year,
). nlme: Linear and Nonlinear Mixed Effects Models. ,
vers, ., sep=))
Note the way that information that may need to be updated is picked up from the
‘DESCRIPTION’ file – it is tempting to hardcode such information, but it normally then gets
outdated. See ?citEntry for further details of the information which can be provided.
The ‘CITATION’ file should itself produce no output when source-d.

1.11 Package types
The ‘DESCRIPTION’ file has an optional field Type which if missing is assumed to be Package,
the sort of extension discussed so far in this chapter. Currently two other types are recognized,
both of which need write permission in the R installation tree.

1.11.1 Frontend
This is a rather general mechanism, designed for adding new front-ends such as the former
gnomeGUI package (see the ‘Archve’ area on CRAN). If a ‘configure’ file is found in the top-
level directory of the package it is executed, and then if a Makefile is found (often generated by
‘configure’), make is called. If R CMD INSTALL --clean is used make clean is called. No other
action is taken.
R CMD build can package up this type of extension, but R CMD check will check the type and
skip it.

1.11.2 Translation
Conventionally, a translation package for language ll is called Translation-ll and has Type:
Translation. It needs to contain the directories ‘share/locale/ll ’ and ‘library/pkgname /
po/ll ’, or at least those for which translations are available. The files ‘.mo’ are installed in the
parallel places in the R installation tree.
For example, a package Translation-it might be prepared from an installed (and tested)
version of R by
mkdir Translation-it
cd Translation-it
(cd $R_HOME; tar cf - share/locale/it library/*/po/it) | tar xf -
# the next step is not needed on Windows
msgfmt -c -o share/locale/it/LC_MESSAGES/RGui.mo $R_SRC_HOME/po/RGui-it.gmo
# create a DESCRIPTION file
cd ..
R CMD build Translation-it
It is probably appropriate to give the package a version number based on the version of R
which has been translated. So the ‘DESCRIPTION’ file might look like


Package: Translation-it
Type: Translation
Version: 2.2.1-1
Title: Italian Translations for R 2.2.1
Description: Italian Translations for R 2.2.1
Author: The translators
Maintainer: Some Body somebody@some.where.net
License: GPL (= 2)

1.12 Services
Several members of the R project have set up services to assist those writing R packages,
particularly those intended for public distribution.
win-builder.r-project.org offers the automated preparation of Windows binaries from well-
tested source packages.
R-Forge (R-Forge.r-project.org) and RForge (www.rforge.net) are similar services with sim-
ilar names. Both provide source-code management through SVN, daily building and checking,
mailing lists and a repository that can be accessed via install.packages (and as from R 2.9.0,
R-Forge can be selected by setRepositories and the GUI menus that use it). Package de-
velopers have the opportunity to present their work on the basis of project websites or news
announcements. Mailing lists, forums or wikis provide useRs with convenient instruments for
discussions and for exchanging information between developers and/or interested useRs.

Chapter 2: Writing R documentation files 35

2 Writing R documentation files

2.1 Rd format
R objects are documented in files written in “R documentation” (Rd) format, a simple markup
language much of which closely resembles (La)TEX, which can be processed into a variety of
formats, including L TEX, HTML and plain text. The translation is carried out by functions in
A
the tools package called by the script Rdconv in ‘R_HOME /bin’ and by the installation scripts for
packages.
The R distribution contains more than 1200 such files which can be found in the
‘src/library/pkg /man’ directories of the R source tree, where pkg stands for one of the
standard packages which are included in the R distribution.
As an example, let us look at a simplified version of ‘src/library/base/man/load.Rd’ which
documents the R function load.
¨
% File src/library/base/man/load.Rd
name{load}
alias{load}
title{Reload Saved Datasets}
description{
Reload the datasets written to a file with the function
code{save}.
}
usage{
load(file, envir = parent.frame())
}
arguments{
item{file}{a connection or a character string giving the
name of the file to load.}
item{envir}{the environment where the data should be
loaded.}
}
seealso{
code{link{save}}.
}
examples{
## save all data
save(list = ls(), file= all.Rdata)

## restore the saved values to the current environment
load(all.Rdata)

## restore the saved values to the workspace
load(all.Rdata, .GlobalEnv)
}
keyword{file}
©
An Rd file consists of three parts. The header gives basic information about the name of
the file, the topics documented, a title, a short textual description and R usage information for
the objects documented. The body gives further information (for example, on the function’s
arguments and return value, as in the above example). Finally, there is a footer with keyword
information. The header is mandatory.
See “Guidelines for Rd files” for guidelines for writing documentation in Rd format which
should be useful for package writers. The R generic function prompt is used to construct a bare-
bones Rd file ready for manual editing. Methods are defined for documenting functions (which
fill in the proper function and argument names) and data frames. There are also functions
promptData, promptPackage, promptClass, and promptMethods for other types of Rd file.


The general syntax of Rd files is summarized below. For a detailed technical discussion of
current Rd syntax, see “Parsing Rd files”. Note that there have been a number of changes to
the Rd format over the years, which can be important if a package is intended to be used with
earlier versions of R. See Section 2.14 [Back-compatibility issues], page 49 for notes on earlier
versions of the Rd format.
As of R 2.10.0, the syntax of Rd files consists of three types of text input. The most common
is L TE
A X-like, with the backslash used as a prefix on markup (e.g. alias), and braces used to
indicate arguments (e.g. {load}). The least common type of text is verbatim text, where no
markup is processed. The third type is R-like, intended for R code, but allowing some embedded
macros. Quoted strings within R-like text are handled specially: regular character escapes such
as n may be entered as-is. Only markup starting with l (e.g. link) or v (e.g. var) will
be recognized within quoted strings. The rarely used vertical tab v must be entered as v.
Each macro defines the input type for its argument. For example, the file initially uses
L TEX-like syntax, and this is also used in the description section, but the usage section
A
uses R-like syntax, and the alias macro uses verbatim syntax. Comments run from a percent
symbol % to the end of the line in all types of text (as on the first line of the load example).
Because backslashes, braces and percent symbols have special meaning, to enter them into
text sometimes requires escapes using a backslash. In general balanced braces do not need to be
escaped, but percent symbols always do. For the complete list of macros and rules for escapes,
see “Parsing Rd files”.

2.1.1 Documenting functions
The basic markup commands used for documenting R objects (in particular, functions) are given
in this subsection.
name{name }
name typically1 is the basename of the Rd file containing the documentation. It
is the “name” of the Rd object represented by the file and has to be unique in a
package. To avoid problems with indexing the package manual, it may not contain
‘!’ ‘|’ nor ‘@’. There can only be one name entry in a file, and it must not contain
any markup.
alias{topic }
The alias entries specify all “topics” the file documents. This information is
collected into index data bases for lookup by the on-line (plain text and HTML)
help systems. The topic can contain spaces, but (for historical reasons) leading
and trailing spaces will be stripped. Percent has always needed to be escaped by
backslash, and as from R 2.9.0 a left brace should be.
There may be several alias entries. Quite often it is convenient to document
several R objects in one file. For example, file ‘Normal.Rd’ documents the density,
distribution function, quantile function and generation of random variates for the
normal distribution, and hence starts with
name{Normal}
alias{Normal}
alias{dnorm}
alias{pnorm}
alias{qnorm}
alias{rnorm}
Also, it is often convenient to have several different ways to refer to an R object,
and an alias does not need to be the name of an object.
1
There can be exceptions: for example Rd files are not allowed to start with a dot, and have to be uniquely
named on a case-insensitive file system.


Note that the name is not necessarily a topic documented, and if so desired it needs
to have an explicit alias entry (as in this example).
title{Title }
Title information for the Rd file. This should be capitalized, not end in a period,
and not use any markup (which would cause problems for hypertext search). Use of
characters other than English text and punctuation (e.g., ‘’) may limit portability.
There must be one (and one only) title section in a help file.
description{...}
A short description of what the function(s) do(es) (one paragraph, a few lines only).
(If a description is “too long” and cannot easily be shortened, the file probably tries
to document too much at once.) This is mandatory except for package-overview
files.
usage{fun (arg1, arg2, ...)}
One or more lines showing the synopsis of the function(s) and variables documented
in the file. These are set in typewriter font. This is an R-like command.
The usage information specified should match the function definition exactly (such
that automatic checking for consistency between code and documentation is possi-
ble).
It is no longer advisable to use synopsis for the actual synopsis and show modified
synopses in the usage. Support for synopsis will be removed eventually. To
indicate that a function can be “used” in several different ways, depending on the
named arguments specified, use section details. E.g., ‘abline.Rd’ contains
details{
Typical usages are
preformatted{
abline(a, b, untf = FALSE, dots)
......
}
Use method{generic }{class } to indicate the name of an S3 method for the
generic function generic for objects inheriting from class class . In the printed
versions, this will come out as generic (reflecting the understanding that methods
should not be invoked directly but via method dispatch), but codoc() and other
QC tools always have access to the full name.
For example, ‘print.ts.Rd’ contains
usage{
method{print}{ts}(x, calendar, dots)
}
which will print as
Usage:

## S3 method for class ’ts’:
print(x, calendar, ...)
Usage for replacement functions should be given in the style of dim(x) - value
rather than explicitly indicating the name of the replacement function (dim- in
the above). Similarly, one can use method{generic }{class }(arglist ) - value
to indicate the usage of an S3 replacement method for the generic replacement
function generic - for objects inheriting from class class .
Usage for S3 methods for extracting or replacing parts of an object, S3 methods for
members of the Ops group, and S3 methods for user-defined (binary) infix opera-


tors (‘%xxx %’) follows the above rules, using the appropriate function names. E.g.,
‘Extract.factor.Rd’ contains
usage{
method{[}{factor}(x, dots, drop = FALSE)
method{[[}{factor}(x, dots)
method{[}{factor}(x, dots) - value
}
which will print as
Usage:

## S3 method for class ’factor’:
x[..., drop = FALSE]
## S3 method for class ’factor’:
x[[...]]
## S3 replacement method for class ’factor’:
x[...] - value
Versions of R since at least 2.0.0 accept S3method as an alternative to method.
arguments{...}
Description of the function’s arguments, using an entry of the form
item{arg_i }{Description of arg_i.}
for each element of the argument list. (Note that there is no whitespace between
the three parts of the entry.) There may be optional text outside the item entries,
for example to give general information about groups of parameters.
details{...}
A detailed if possible precise description of the functionality provided, extending
the basic information in the description slot.
value{...}
Description of the function’s return value.
If a list with multiple values is returned, you can use entries of the form
item{comp_i }{Description of comp_i.}
for each component of the list returned. Optional text may precede2 this list (see
for example the help for rle). Note that value is implicitly a describe environ-
ment, so that environment should not be used for listing components, just individual
item{}{} entries.
references{...}
A section with references to the literature. Use url{} for web pointers.
note{...}
Use this for a special note you want to have pointed out.
For example, ‘pie.Rd’ contains
note{
Pie charts are a very bad way of displaying information.
The eye is good at judging linear measures and bad at
judging relative areas.
......
}
2
Text between or after list items was discarded prior to R 2.10.0, and is discouraged.


author{...}
Information about the author(s) of the Rd file. Use email{} without extra delim-
iters (‘( )’ or ‘ ’) to specify email addresses, or url{} for web pointers.
seealso{...}
Pointers to related R objects, using code{link{...}} to refer to them (code is
the correct markup for R object names, and link produces hyperlinks in output
formats which support this. See Section 2.3 [Marking text], page 42, and Section 2.5
[Cross-references], page 44).
examples{...}
Examples of how to use the function. Code in this section is set in typewriter font
without reformatting and is run by example() unless marked otherwise (see below).
Examples are not only useful for documentation purposes, but also provide test code
used for diagnostic checking of R code. By default, text inside examples{} will
be displayed in the output of the help page and run by example() and by R CMD
check. You can use dontrun{} for text that should only be shown, but not run,
and dontshow{} for extra commands for testing that should not be shown to users,
but will be run by example(). (Previously this was called testonly, and that is
still accepted.)
Text inside dontrun{} is verbatim, but the other parts of the examples section
are R-like text.
For example,
x - runif(10) # Shown and run.
dontrun{plot(x)} # Only shown.
dontshow{log(x)} # Only run.
Thus, example code not included in dontrun must be executable! In addition, it
should not use any system-specific features or require special facilities (such as In-
ternet access or write permission to specific directories). Text included in dontrun
is indicated by comments in the processed help files: it need not be valid R code
but the escapes must still be used for %, and unpaired braces as in other verbatim
text.
Data needed for making the examples executable can be obtained by random number
generation (for example, x - rnorm(100)), or by using standard data sets listed
by data() (see ?data for more info).
Finally, there is donttest, used (at the beginning of a separate line) to mark code
that should be run by examples() but not by R CMD check. This should be needed
only occasionally but can be used for code which might fail in circumstances that
are hard to test for, for example in some locales. (Use e.g. capabilities() to test
for features needed in the examples wherever possible, and you can also use try()
or trycatch().)
There should be only one examples section per file, and only the first will be used.
keyword{key }
Each keyword entry should specify one of the standard keywords as listed in
file ‘KEYWORDS’ in the R documentation directory (default ‘R_HOME /doc’). Use
e.g. file.show(file.path(R.home(doc), KEYWORDS)) to inspect the stan-
dard keywords from within R. There can be more than one keyword entry if the R
object being documented falls into more than one category.
The special keyword ‘internal’ marks a page of internal objects that are not part
of the packages’ API. If the help page for object foo has keyword ‘internal’, then


help(foo) gives this help page, but foo is excluded from several object indices, like
the alphabetical list of objects in the HTML help system.

2.1.2 Documenting data sets
The structure of Rd files which document R data sets is slightly different. Sections such as
arguments and value are not needed but the format and source of the data should be ex-
plained.
As an example, let us look at ‘src/library/datasets/man/rivers.Rd’ which documents
the standard R data set rivers.
¨
name{rivers}
docType{data}
alias{rivers}
title{Lengths of Major North American Rivers}
description{
This data set gives the lengths (in miles) of 141 dQuote{major}
rivers in North America, as compiled by the US Geological
Survey.
}
usage{rivers}
format{A vector containing 141 observations.}
source{World Almanac and Book of Facts, 1975, page 406.}
references{
McNeil, D. R. (1977) emph{Interactive Data Analysis}.
New York: Wiley.
}
keyword{datasets}
©
This uses the following additional markup commands.
docType{...}
Indicates the “type” of the documentation object. Always ‘data’ for data sets, and
‘package’ for ‘pkg-package.Rd’ overview files.
format{...}
A description of the format of the data set (as a vector, matrix, data frame, time
series, . . . ). For matrices and data frames this should give a description of each
column, preferably as a list or table. See Section 2.4 [Lists and tables], page 43, for
more information.
source{...}
Details of the original source (a reference or URL). In addition, section references
could give secondary sources and usages.
Note also that when documenting data set bar,
• The usage entry is always bar or (for packages which do not use lazy-loading of data)
data(bar ). (In particular, only document a single data object per Rd file.)
• The keyword entry is always ‘datasets’.
If bar is a data frame, documenting it as a data set can be initiated via prompt(bar ).
Otherwise, the promptData function may be used.

2.1.3 Documenting S4 classes and methods
There are special ways to use the ‘?’ operator, namely ‘class?topic ’ and ‘methods?topic ’,
to access documentation for S4 classes and methods, respectively. This mechanism depends on
conventions for the topic names used in alias entries. The topic names for S4 classes and
methods respectively are of the form


class-class
generic,signature_list-method
where signature list contains the names of the classes in the signature of the method (without
quotes) separated by ‘,’ (without whitespace), with ‘ANY’ used for arguments without an explicit
specification. E.g., ‘genericFunction-class’ is the topic name for documentation for the S4
class genericFunction, and ‘coerce,ANY,NULL-method’ is the topic name for documentation
for the S4 method for coerce for signature c(ANY, NULL).
Skeletons of documentation for S4 classes and methods can be generated by using the func-
tions promptClass() and promptMethods() from package methods. If it is necessary or desired
to provide an explicit function declaration (in a usage section) for an S4 method (e.g., if it has
“surprising arguments” to be mentioned explicitly), one can use the special markup
S4method{generic }{signature_list }(argument_list )
(e.g., ‘S4method{coerce}{ANY,NULL}(from, to)’).
To make full use of the potential of the on-line documentation system, all user-visible S4
classes and methods in a package should at least have a suitable alias entry in one of the
package’s Rd files. If a package has methods for a function defined originally somewhere else,
and does not change the underlying default method for the function, the package is responsible
for documenting the methods it creates, but not for the function itself or the default method.
An S4 replacement method is documented in the same way as an S3 one: see the description
of method in Section 2.1.1 [Documenting functions], page 36.
See help(Documentation, package = methods) for more information on using and cre-
ating on-line documentation for S4 classes and methods.

2.1.4 Documenting packages
Packages may have an overview help page with an alias pkgname -package, e.g.
‘utils-package’ for the utils package, when package?pkgname will open that help page. If a
topic named pkgname does not exist in another Rd file, it is helpful to use this as an additional
alias.
Skeletons of documentation for a package can be generated using the function
promptPackage(). If the final = TRUE argument is used, then the Rd file will be generated
in final form, containing the information that would be produced up to library(help =
pkgname ). Otherwise (the default) comments will be inserted giving suggestions for content.
Apart from the mandatory name and title and the pkgname -package alias, the only
requirement for the package overview page is that it include a docType{package} statement.
All other content is optional. We suggest that it should be a short overview, to give a reader
unfamiliar with the package enough information to get started. More extensive documentation is
better placed into a package vignette (see Section 1.4 [Writing package vignettes], page 20) and
referenced from this page, or into individual man pages for the functions, datasets, or classes.

2.2 Sectioning
To begin a new paragraph or leave a blank line in an example, just insert an empty line (as in
(La)TEX). To break a line, use cr.
In addition to the predefined sections (such as description{}, value{}, etc.), you can
“define” arbitrary ones by section{section_title }{...}. For example
section{Warning}{
You must not call this function unless ...
}


For consistency with the pre-assigned sections, the section name (the first argument to section)
should be capitalized (but not all upper case). Whitespace between the first and second braced
expressions is not allowed as from R 2.10.0.
Note that additional named sections are always inserted at a fixed position in the output
(before note, seealso and the examples), no matter where they appear in the input (but in
the same order amongst themselves as in the input).

2.3 Marking text
The following logical markup commands are available for emphasizing or quoting text.
emph{text }
strong{text }
Emphasize text using italic and bold font if possible; strong is regarded as stronger
(more emphatic).
bold{text }
Set text in bold font if possible.
sQuote{text }
dQuote{text }
Portably single or double quote text (without hard-wiring the characters used for
quotation marks).
Each of the above commands takes L TEX-like input, so other macros may be used within
A
text.
The following logical markup commands are available for indicating specific kinds of text.
Except as noted, these take verbatim text input, and so other macros may not be used within
them. Some characters will need to be escaped (see Section 2.7 [Insertions], page 45).
code{text }
Indicate text that is a literal example of a piece of an R program, e.g., a fragment of
R code or the name of an R object. Text is entered in R-like syntax, and displayed
using typewriter font if possible. Macros var and link are interpreted within
text.
preformatted{text }
Indicate text that is a literal example of a piece of a program. Text is displayed
using typewriter font if possible. Formatting, e.g. line breaks, is preserved.
Due to limitations in L TEX as of this writing, this macro may not be nested within
A
other markup macros other than dQuote and sQuote, as errors or bad formatting
may result.
kbd{keyboard-characters }
Indicate keyboard input, using slanted typewriter font if possible, so users can
distinguish the characters they are supposed to type from computer output. Text
is entered verbatim.
samp{text }
Indicate text that is a literal example of a sequence of characters, entered verbatim.
No wrapping or reformatting will occur.
verb{text }
Indicate text that is a literal example of a sequence of characters, with no interpre-
tation of e.g. var, but which will be included within word-wrapped text.
pkg{package_name }
Indicate the name of an R package. L TEX-like.
A


file{file_name }
Indicate the name of a file. Text is L TEX-like, so backslash needs to be escaped.
A

email{email_address }
Indicate an electronic mail address. L TEX-like, will be rendered as a hyperlink in
A
HTML and PDF conversion.

url{uniform_resource_locator }
Indicate a uniform resource locator (URL) for the World Wide Web. The argument
is handled verbatim, and rendered as a hyperlink in HTML and PDF conversion.

var{metasyntactic_variable }
Indicate a metasyntactic variable. In some cases this will be rendered distinctly, e.g.
in italic, but not in all3 . L TEX-like.
A

env{environment_variable }
Indicate an environment variable. Verbatim.

option{option }
Indicate a command-line option. Verbatim.

command{command_name }
Indicate the name of a command. L TEX-like.
A

dfn{term }
Indicate the introductory or defining use of a term. L TEX-like.
A

cite{reference }
Indicate a reference without a direct cross-reference via link (see Section 2.5
[Cross-references], page 44), such as the name of a book. L TEX-like.
A

acronym{acronym }
Indicate an acronym (an abbreviation written in all capital letters), such as GNU.
L TEX-like.
A

2.4 Lists and tables
The itemize and enumerate commands take a single argument, within which there may be
one or more item commands. The text following each item is formatted as one or more para-
graphs, suitably indented and with the first paragraph marked with a bullet point (itemize)
or a number (enumerate).
itemize and enumerate commands may be nested.
The describe command is similar to itemize but allows initial labels to be specified.
Each item takes two arguments, the label and the body of the item, in exactly the same way
as an argument or value item. describe commands are mapped to DL lists in HTML and
description lists in L TEX.
A

The tabular command takes two arguments. The first gives for each of the columns the
required alignment (‘l’ for left-justification, ‘r’ for right-justification or ‘c’ for centring.) The
second argument consists of an arbitrary number of lines separated by cr, and with fields
separated by tab. For example:

3
Currently it is rendered differently only in HTML conversions, and L TEX conversion outside ‘usage’ and
A
‘examples’ environments.


tabular{rlll}{
[,1] tab Ozone tab numeric tab Ozone (ppb)cr
[,2] tab Solar.R tab numeric tab Solar R (lang)cr
[,3] tab Wind tab numeric tab Wind (mph)cr
[,4] tab Temp tab numeric tab Temperature (degrees F)cr
[,5] tab Month tab numeric tab Month (1--12)cr
[,6] tab Day tab numeric tab Day of month (1--31)
}
There must be the same number of fields on each line as there are alignments in the first
argument, and they must be non-empty (but can contain only spaces). (There is no whitespace
between tabular and the first argument, nor between the two arguments.)

2.5 Cross-references
The markup link{foo } (usually in the combination code{link{foo }}) produces a hyper-
link to the help for foo. Here foo is a topic, that is the argument of alias markup in another
Rd file (possibly in another package). Hyperlinks are supported in some of the formats to which
Rd files are converted, for example HTML and PDF, but ignored in others, e.g. the text format.
One main usage of link is in the seealso section of the help page, see Section 2.1 [Rd
format], page 35.
Note that whereas leading and trailing spaces are stripped when extracting a topic from a
alias, they are not stripped when looking up the topic of a link.
You can specify a link to a different topic than its name by link[=dest ]{name } which links
to topic dest with name name. This can be used to refer to the documentation for S3/4 classes,
for example code{link[=abc-class]{abc}} would be a way to refer to the documentation
of an S4 class abc defined in your package, and code{link[=terms.object]{terms}}
to the S3 terms class (in package stats). To make these easy to read in the source file,
code{linkS4class{abc}} expands to the form given above.
There are two other forms of optional argument specified as link[pkg ]{foo } and
link[pkg:bar ]{foo } to link to the package pkg, to files ‘foo.html’ and ‘bar.html’
respectively. These are rarely needed, perhaps to refer to not-yet-installed packages (but there
the HTML help system will resolve the link at run time) or in the normally undesirable event
that more than one package offers help on a topic4 (in which case the present package has
precedence so this is only needed to refer to other packages). They are currently only used in
HTML help (and ignored for hyperlinks in L TEX conversions of help pages), and link to the
A
file rather than the topic (since there is no way to know which topics are in which files in an
uninstalled package). The only reason to use these forms for base and recommended packages
is to force a reference to a package that might be further down the search path. Because they
have been frequently misused, as from R 2.10.0 the HTML help system looks for topic foo in
package pkg if it does not find file ‘foo.html’.

2.6 Mathematics
Mathematical formulae should be set beautifully for printed documentation yet we still
want something useful for text and HTML online help. To this end, the two commands
eqn{latex }{ascii } and deqn{latex }{ascii } are used. Whereas eqn is used for “inline”
formulae (corresponding to TEX’s $...$), deqn gives “displayed equations” (as in L TEX’s
A
displaymath environment, or TEX’s $$...$$). Both arguments are treated as verbatim text.

4
a common example in CRAN packages is link[mgcv]{gam}.


Both commands can also be used as eqn{latexascii } (only one argument) which then
is used for both latex and ascii. No whitespace is allowed between command and the first
argument, nor (prior to Rd version 1.1) between the first and second arguments.
The following example is from ‘Poisson.Rd’:
deqn{p(x) = frac{lambda^x e^{-lambda}}{x!}}{%
p(x) = lambda^x exp(-lambda)/x!}
for eqn{x = 0, 1, 2, ldots}.
For the L TEX manual, this becomes
A
¨
e−λ
p(x) = λx
x!
for x = 0, 1, 2, . . ..
©
For HTML and text on-line help we get
¨
p(x) = lambda^x exp(-lambda)/x!

for x = 0, 1, 2, ....
©
See Section 2.14 [Back-compatibility issues], page 49 for earlier problems with eqn with one
argument immediately followed by a right brace.
Note that only basic L TEX can be used, there being no provision to specify L TEX style files
A A
such as the AMS extensions.

2.7 Insertions
Use R for the R system itself. Use dots for the dots in function argument lists ‘...’, and
ldots for ellipsis dots in ordinary text.5 These can be followed by {}, and should be unless
followed by whitespace.
After an unescaped ‘%’, you can put your own comments regarding the help text. The rest
of the line (but not the newline at the end) will be completely disregarded. Therefore, you can
also use it to make part of the “help” invisible.
You can produce a backslash (‘’) by escaping it by another backslash. (Note that cr is
used for generating line breaks.)
The “comment” character ‘%’ and unpaired braces6 almost always need to be escaped by ‘’,
and ‘’ can be used for backslash and needs to be when there two or more adjacent backslashes).
In R-like code literal strings are slightly more forgiving; see “Parsing Rd files” for details.
All of ‘% { } ’ should be escaped in L TEX-like text.
A

Text which might need to be represented differently in different encodings should be marked
by enc, e.g. enc{J¨reskog}{Joreskog} (with no whitespace between the braces) where the
o
first argument will be used where encodings are allowed and the second should be ASCII (and is
used for e.g. the text conversion). (This is intended to be used for individual words, not whole
sentences or paragraphs.)

5
There is only a fine distinction between dots and dots. It is technically incorrect to use ldots in code
blocks and tools::checkRd will warn about this—on the other hand the current converters treat them the
same way in code blocks, and elsewhere apart from the small distinction between the two in LaTeX.
6
See the examples section in the file ‘Paren.Rd’ for an example.


2.8 Indices
The alias command (see Section 2.1.1 [Documenting functions], page 36) is used to specify
the “topics” documented, which should include all R objects in a package such as functions and
variables, data sets, and S4 classes and methods (see Section 2.1.3 [Documenting S4 classes and
methods], page 40). The on-line help system searches the index data base consisting of all alias
topics.
In addition, it is possible to provide “concept index entries” using concept, which can be
used for help.search() lookups. E.g., file ‘cor.test.Rd’ in the standard package stats contains
concept{Kendall correlation coefficient}
concept{Pearson correlation coefficient}
concept{Spearman correlation coefficient}
so that e.g. ??Spearman will succeed in finding the help page for the test for association between
paired samples using Spearman’s ρ.
(Note that help.search() only uses “sections” of documentation objects with no additional
markup.)
If you want to cross reference such items from other help files via link, you need to use
alias and not concept.

2.9 Platform-specific documentation
Sometimes the documentation needs to differ by platform. Currently two OS-specific options
are available, ‘unix’ and ‘windows’, and lines in the help source file can be enclosed in
#ifdef OS
...
#endif
or
#ifndef OS
...
#endif
for OS-specific inclusion or exclusion. Such blocks should not be nested, and should be entirely
within a block (that, is between the opening and closing brace of a section or item), or at
top-level contain one or more complete sections.
If the differences between platforms are extensive or the R objects documented are only rele-
vant to one platform, platform-specific Rd files can be put in a ‘unix’ or ‘windows’ subdirectory.

2.10 Conditional text
Occasionally the best content for one output format is different from the best content for another.
For this situation, the if{format }{text } or ifelse{format }{text }{alternate } markup
is used. Here format is a comma separated list of formats in which the text should be rendered.
The alternate will be rendered if the format does not match. Both text and alternate may be
any sequence of text and markup.
Currently the following formats are recognized: example, html, latex and text. These select
output for the corresponding targets. (Note that example refers to extracted example code
rather than the displayed example in some other format.) Also accepted are TRUE (matching
all formats) and FALSE (matching no formats). These could be the output of the Sexpr macro
(see Section 2.11 [Dynamic pages], page 47).
The out{literal } macro would usually be used within the text part of
if{format }{text }. It causes the renderer to output the literal text exactly, with no attempt


to escape special characters. For example, use the following to output the markup necessary to
display the Greek letter in L TEX or HTML, and the text string alpha in other formats:
A

if{latex}{out{alpha}}ifelse{html}{out{alpha;}}{alpha}

2.11 Dynamic pages
Two new macros supporting dynamically generated man pages were introduced in R 2.10.0,
Sexpr and RdOpts. These are modelled after Sweave, and are intended to contain executable
R expressions in the Rd file.
The main argument to Sexpr must be valid R code that can be executed. It may also take
options in square brackets before the main argument. Depending on the options, the code may
be executed at package build time, package install time, or man page rendering time.
The options follow the same format as in Sweave, but different options are supported. Cur-
rently the allowed options and their defaults are:
• eval=TRUE Whether the R code should be evaluated.
• echo=FALSE Whether the R code should be echoed. If TRUE, a display will be given in a
preformatted block. For example, Sexpr[echo=TRUE]{ x - 1 } will be displayed as
x - 1
• keep.source=TRUE Whether to keep the author’s formatting when displaying the code, or
throw it away and use a deparsed version.
• results=text How should the results be displayed? The possibilities are:
− results=text Apply as.character() to the result of the code, and insert it as a text
element.
− results=verbatim Print the results of the code just as if it was executed at the console,
and include the printed results verbatim. (Invisible results will not print.)
− results=rd The result is assumed to be a character vector containing markup to be
passed to parse_Rd(fragment=TRUE), with the result inserted in place. This could be
used to insert computed aliases, for instance.
− results=hide Insert no output.
• strip.white=TRUE Remove leading and trailing white space from each line of output if
strip.white=TRUE. With strip.white=all, also remove blank lines.
• stage=install Control when this macro is run. Possible values are
− stage=build The macro is run when building a source tarball. Currently this stage is
not processed.
− stage=install The macro is run when installing from source.
− stage=render The macro is run when displaying the help page.
Conditionals such as #ifdef (see Section 2.9 [Platform-specific sections], page 46) are ap-
plied after the build macros but before the install macros. In some situations (e.g.
installing directly from a source directory without a tarball, or building a binary package)
the above descriptions may not be accurate, but authors should be able to rely on the
sequence being build, #ifdef, install, render, with all stages executed7 .
Code is only run once in each stage, so a Sexpr[results=rd] macro can output an Sexpr
macro designed for a later stage, but not for the current one or any earlier stage.
• width, height, fig These options are currently allowed but ignored.
The RdOpts macro is used to set new defaults for options to apply to following uses of
Sexpr.
For more details, see the online document “Parsing Rd files”.
7
As noted above, the build stage is not currently implemented.


2.12 Encoding
Rd files are text files and so it is impossible to deduce the encoding they are written in unless
ASCII: files with 8-bit characters could be UTF-8, Latin-1, Latin-9, KOI8-R, EUC-JP, etc. So the
encoding{} directive must be used to specify the encoding if it is not ASCII. (The encoding{}
directive must be on a line by itself, and in particular one containing no non-ASCII characters.
There should be only one encoding{} directive per file, but only the first will be used. As
from R 2.6.0 the encoding declared in the ‘DESCRIPTION’ file will be used if none is declared in
the file.) This is for input: internally, the Rd files are converted to the UTF-8 encoding. It is
also used for output in the case of L TEX conversions, while HTML is output in UTF-8 and text
A
is output in the local encoding.
Wherever possible, avoid non-ASCII chars in Rd files, and even symbols such as ‘’, ‘’,
‘$’, ‘^’, ‘’, ‘|’, ‘@’, ‘~’, and ‘*’ outside verbatim environments (since they may disappear in
fonts designed to render text). (Function showNonASCII in package tools can help in finding
non-ASCII bytes in the files.)
For convenience, encoding names ‘latin1’ and ‘latin2’ are always recognized: these and
‘UTF-8’ are likely to work fairly widely. However, this does not mean that all characters in
UTF-8 will be recognized, and the coverage of non-Latin characters8 is low.
The enc command (see Section 2.7 [Insertions], page 45) can be used to provide transliter-
ations which will be used in conversions that do not support the declared encoding.
The L TEX conversion converts an explicit encoding of the file to a
A

inputencoding{some_encoding }
command, and this needs to be matched by a suitable invocation of the usepackage{inputenc}
command. The R utility R CMD Rd2dvi looks at the converted code and includes the encodings
used: it might for example use
usepackage[latin1,latin9,utf8]{inputenc}
(Use of utf8 as an encoding requires L TEX dated 2003/12/01 or later. Also, the use of Cyrillic
A
characters in ‘UTF-8’ appears to also need ‘usepackage[T2A]{fontenc}’, and R CMD Rd2dvi
includes this conditionally on the file ‘t2aenc.def’ being present and environment variable
_R_CYRILLIC_TEX_ being set.)
Note that this mechanism works best with Latin letters and for example the copyright symbol
may be rendered as a superscript and the plus–minus symbol cannot be used in text.

2.13 Processing Rd format
There are several commands to process Rd files from the system command line.
Using R CMD Rdconv one can convert R documentation format to other formats, or extract
the executable examples for run-time testing. The currently supported conversions are to plain
text, HTML and L TEX as well as extraction of the examples.
A

R CMD Rd2dvi generates DVI (or, if option ‘--pdf’ is given, PDF) output from documentation
in Rd files, which can be specified either explicitly or by the path to a directory with the sources
of a package. In the latter case, a reference manual for all documented objects in the package is
created, including the information in the ‘DESCRIPTION’ files.
R CMD Sd2Rd converts S version 3 documentation files (which use an extended Nroff format)
and S version 4 documentation (which uses SGML markup) to Rd format. This is useful when
porting a package originally written for the S system to R. S version 3 files usually have extension
8
R 2.9.0 added support for UTF-8 Cyrillic characters in L TEX, but on some OSes this will need Cyrillic support
A
added to L TEX, so environment variable _R_CYRILLIC_TEX_ needs to be set to a non-empty value to enable
A
this.


‘.d’, whereas version 4 ones have extension ‘.sgml’ or ‘.sgm’. (This command is deprecated,
and requires Perl to be installed.)
R CMD Sweave and R CMD Stangle process ‘Sweave’ documentation files (usually with exten-
sion ‘.Snw’ or ‘.Rnw’): R CMD Stangle is use to extract the R code fragments.
The exact usage and a detailed list of available options for all of these commands can be ob-
tained by running R CMD command --help, e.g., R CMD Rdconv --help. All available commands
can be listed using R --help (or Rcmd --help under Windows).
All of these work under Windows. You will need to have installed the files in the R binary
Windows distribution for installing source packages (this is true for a default installation), and
for R CMD Rd2dvi also the tools to build packages from source as described in the “R Installation
and Administration” manual.

2.14 Back-compatibility issues
Packages that are intended to work with earlier versions of R need to be written in a different
dialect, and some notes follow. R 2.10.0 processes Rd files as version 2 (as described here); R
2.9.x assumed files were version 1 (unnumbered) unless they were declared to be version 1.1; R
2.8.1 and earlier used version 1 (unnumbered)
Some package authors have included arbitrary pieces of L TEX mathematical notation into
A
text descriptions, e.g. ‘$mu$g’ and ‘$^circ$C’. Whether this works even in latex conversion
depends on the version of R, and it has always given ugly results in other conversions. If
mathematical notation is necessary (and it seems it is not in the examples given), use eqn.

2.14.1 Changes in R 2.10.0
We now convert ‘.Rd’ files in R (rather than in Perl). Differences from version 1.1 include
• % never escapes the newline: it used to in text-like modes but not in e.g. usage and
examples sections. This means that constructions like
deqn{
latex version
}{%
text version
}
are rendered in text conversion with an extra line, and inter-line comments like
item{x, y}{logical (or dQuote{number-like}, i.e., of type
code{link{double}} (class code{link{numeric}}), code{link{integer}},
%% incl. factor
code{link{complex}} or code{link{raw}}) vectors, or objects for
which methods have been written.}
start a new paragraph.
• Unmatched right braces are an error, not just a warning.
• No whitespace is allowed between the first and second arguments of a macro such as item
— files parse with a warning but may not be converted correctly.
• code is intended only for R code, and as such its argument must be syntactically valid
once macros such as link and var have been substituted. This means that quotes must
balance. Use verb (only in R 2.10.0 or later) or samp or kbd for code snippets and code
in other languages.
• preformatted is verbatim, so var is not interpreted.
• Both arguments of dean and eqn are verbatim, so for example code is not rendered
there.


2.14.2 Changes in R 2.9.0
Rd version 1.1 was introduced in R 2.9.0. The main changes were
• ‘$’ is treated literally in text, even for latex conversion.
• ‘’ is only an escape before ‘% { } ’, and these should always be escaped (although paired
braces inside code will be still be handled if unescaped). ‘#’, ‘_’ and ‘’ must not be
escaped.
• ‘R{}’ is accepted as an alternative to ‘R’. Similarly for ‘dots’ and ‘ldots’.
• Whitespace is allowed between the first and second arguments of item and section.
• Interpretation of ‘Alpha’ etc is no longer done.

2.14.3 Unnumbered versions
Prior to version 1.1, ‘$’ needs to be escaped by backslash in “regular” text (not verbatim-like,
not in the first argument of eqn, . . . ), and ‘#’, ‘_’ and ‘’ can be.
For historical reasons, the TEX/L TEX commands alpha, Alpha, beta, Gamma, epsilon,
A
lambda, mu, pi, sigma, Sigma, le, ge, left( and right) were accepted, and inter-
preted in text and HTML conversions. The preferred way to handle these is as part of eqn or
deqn.
Further, ‘^’, ‘~’, ‘’, ‘’ and ‘|’ were not in general safe to use in non-code text.
The advice was to enter ‘^’ as eqn{mbox{textasciicircum}}{^}, and ‘~’ by
eqn{mbox{textasciitilde}}{~} or eqn{sim}{~} (for a short and long tilde
respectively). Also, ‘’, ‘’, and ‘|’ could only be used safely in math mode, i.e., within the first
argument of eqn or deqn.
‘R’, ‘dots’ and ‘ldots’ were not followed by ‘{~}’
Versions of R prior to 2.8.1 failed to process correctly constructions such as
item{name}{some text eqn{x}}
the problem being the one- or two-argument command eqn immediately followed by a right
brace. In many cases this can be resolved by adding punctuation, and even space before the
final brace sufficed.
It was never intended to allow whitespace between arguments to two-argument commands,
e.g.
item{name} {some text}
had always been an error. However, prior to R 2.9.0 this error was not looked for and resulted
in incorrect output (often by omitting entirely the text for the item, sometimes with a warning).
R 2.9.0 detected and fixed most cases of this error, with a warning unless the file was declared
as version 1.1 or later. As of R 2.10.0, it is an error.
A value block is implicitly a itemize environment, but quite a few package writers have
ignored this. As from R 2.8.1 this is detected, and the itemize command (but not its contents)
removed, with a warning.

Chapter 3: Tidying and profiling R code 51

3 Tidying and profiling R code
R code which is worth preserving in a package and perhaps making available for others to use
is worth documenting, tidying up and perhaps optimizing. The last two of these activities are
the subject of this chapter.

3.1 Tidying R code
R treats function code loaded from packages and code entered by users differently. Code entered
by users has the source code stored in an attribute, and when the function is listed, the original
source is reproduced. Loading code from a package (by default) discards the source code, and
the function listing is re-created from the parse tree of the function.
Normally keeping the source code is a good idea, and in particular it avoids comments being
moved around in the source. However, we can make use of the ability to re-create a function
listing from its parse tree to produce a tidy version of the function, for example with consistent
indentation and spaces around operators. This tidied version is much easier to read, not least
by other users who are used to the standard format. Although the deparsing cannot do so, we
recommend the consistent use of the preferred assignment operator ‘-’ (rather than ‘=’) for
assignment.
We can subvert the keeping of source in two ways.
1. The option keep.source can be set to FALSE before the code is loaded into R.
2. The stored source code can be removed by removing the source attribute, for example by
attr(myfun, source) - NULL
In each case if we then list the function we will get the standard layout.
Suppose we have a file of functions ‘myfuns.R’ that we want to tidy up. Create a file ‘tidy.R’
containing
options(keep.source = FALSE)
source(myfuns.R)
dump(ls(all = TRUE), file = new.myfuns.R)
and run R with this as the source file, for example by R --vanilla tidy.R or by pasting into
an R session. Then the file ‘new.myfuns.R’ will contain the functions in alphabetical order in
the standard layout. Warning: comments in your functions will be lost.
The standard format provides a good starting point for further tidying. Many package
authors use a version of Emacs (on Unix or Windows) to edit R code, using the ESS[S] mode
of the ESS Emacs package. See Section “R coding standards” in R Internals for style options
within the ESS[S] mode recommended for the source code of R itself.

3.2 Profiling R code for speed
It is possible to profile R code on Windows and most1 Unix-like versions of R.
The command Rprof is used to control profiling, and its help page can be consulted for full
details. Profiling works by recording at fixed intervals2 (by default every 20 msecs) which R
function is being used, and recording the results in a file (default ‘Rprof.out’ in the working di-
rectory). Then the function summaryRprof or the command-line utility R CMD Rprof Rprof.out
can be used to summarize the activity.
As an example, consider the following code (from Venables Ripley, 2002).
1
R has to be built to enable this, but the option ‘--enable-R-profiling’ is the default.
2
For Unix-alikes these are intervals of CPU time, and for Windows of elapsed time.


library(MASS); library(boot)
storm.fm - nls(Time ~ b*Viscosity/(Wt - c), stormer,
start = c(b=30.401, c=2.2183))
st - cbind(stormer, fit=fitted(storm.fm))
storm.bf - function(rs, i) {
st$Time - st$fit + rs[i]
tmp - nls(Time ~ (b * Viscosity)/(Wt - c), st,
start = coef(storm.fm))
tmp$m$getAllPars()
}
rs - scale(resid(storm.fm), scale = FALSE) # remove the mean
Rprof(boot.out)
storm.boot - boot(rs, storm.bf, R = 4999) # pretty slow
Rprof(NULL)

Having run this we can summarize the results by
R CMD Rprof boot.out

Each sample represents 0.02 seconds.
Total run time: 80.74 seconds.

Total seconds: time spent in function and callees.
Self seconds: time spent in function alone.

% total % self
total seconds self seconds name
100.00 80.74 0.22 0.18 boot
99.65 80.46 1.19 0.96 statistic
96.33 77.78 2.68 2.16 nls
50.21 40.54 1.54 1.24 Anonymous
47.11 38.04 1.83 1.48 .Call
23.06 18.62 2.43 1.96 eval
19.87 16.04 0.67 0.54 as.list
18.97 15.32 0.64 0.52 switch
17.88 14.44 0.47 0.38 model.frame
17.41 14.06 1.73 1.40 model.frame.default
17.41 14.06 2.80 2.26 nlsModel
15.43 12.46 1.88 1.52 qr.qty
13.40 10.82 3.07 2.48 assign
12.73 10.28 2.33 1.88 storage.mode-
12.34 9.96 1.81 1.46 qr.coef
10.13 8.18 5.42 4.38 paste
...

% self % total
self seconds total seconds name
5.42 4.38 10.13 8.18 paste
3.37 2.72 6.71 5.42 as.integer
3.29 2.66 5.00 4.04 as.double
3.20 2.58 4.29 3.46 seq.default
3.07 2.48 13.40 10.82 assign
2.92 2.36 5.95 4.80 names
2.80 2.26 17.41 14.06 nlsModel
2.68 2.16 96.33 77.78 nls
2.53 2.04 2.53 2.04 .Fortran
2.43 1.96 23.06 18.62 eval
2.33 1.88 12.73 10.28 storage.mode-
...

This often produces surprising results and can be used to identify bottlenecks or pieces of R
code that could benefit from being replaced by compiled code.
R CMD Rprof uses a Perl script that may be a little faster than summaryRprof for large files.
On the other hand summaryRprof does not require Perl and provides the results as an R object.


Two warnings: profiling does impose a small performance penalty, and the output files can
be very large if long runs are profiled.
Profiling short runs can sometimes give misleading results. R from time to time performs
garbage collection to reclaim unused memory, and this takes an appreciable amount of time
which profiling will charge to whichever function happens to provoke it. It may be useful to
compare profiling code immediately after a call to gc() with a profiling run without a preceding
call to gc.
More detailed analysis of the output can be achieved by the tools in the CRAN packages
proftools and prof: in particular these allow call graphs to be studied.

3.3 Profiling R code for memory use
Measuring memory use in R code is useful either when the code takes more memory than is
conveniently available or when memory allocation and copying of objects is responsible for slow
code. There are three ways to profile memory use over time in R code. All three require R to
have been compiled with ‘--enable-memory-profiling’, which is not the default. All can be
misleading, for different reasons.
In understanding the memory profiles it is useful to know a little more about R’s memory
allocation. Looking at the results of gc() shows a division of memory into Vcells used to store
the contents of vectors and Ncells used to store everything else, including all the administrative
overhead for vectors such as type and length information. In fact the vector contents are divided
into two pools. Memory for small vectors (by default 128 bytes or less) is obtained in large chunks
and then parcelled out by R; memory for larger vectors is obtained directly from the operating
system.
Some memory allocation is obvious in interpreted code, for example,
y - x + 1
allocates memory for a new vector y. Other memory allocation is less obvious and occurs because
R is forced to make good on its promise of ‘call-by-value’ argument passing. When an argument
is passed to a function it is not immediately copied. Copying occurs (if necessary) only when
the argument is modified. This can lead to surprising memory use. For example, in the ‘survey’
package we have
print.svycoxph - function (x, ...)
{
print(x$survey.design, varnames = FALSE, design.summaries = FALSE,
...)
x$call - x$printcall
NextMethod()
}
It may not be obvious that the assignment to x$call will cause the entire object x to be copied.
This copying to preserve the call-by-value illusion is usually done by the internal C function
duplicate.
The main reason that memory-use profiling is difficult is garbage collection. Memory is
allocated at well-defined times in an R program, but is freed whenever the garbage collector
happens to run.

3.3.1 Memory statistics from Rprof
The sampling profiler Rprof described in the previous section can be given the option
memory.profiling=TRUE. It then writes out the total R memory allocation in small vectors,
large vectors, and cons cells or nodes at each sampling interval. It also writes out the number
of calls to the internal function duplicate, which is called to copy R objects. summaryRprof
provides summaries of this information. The main reason that this can be misleading is that
the memory use is attributed to the function running at the end of the sampling interval. A


second reason is that garbage collection can make the amount of memory in use decrease, so a
function appears to use little memory. Running under gctorture helps with both problems: it
slows down the code to effectively increase the sampling frequency and it makes each garbage
collection release a smaller amount of memory. Changing the memory limits with mem.limits()
may also be useful, to see how the code would run under different memory conditions.

3.3.2 Tracking memory allocations
The second method of memory profiling uses a memory-allocation profiler, Rprofmem(), which
writes out a stack trace to an output file every time a large vector is allocated (with a user-
specified threshold for ‘large’) or a new page of memory is allocated for the R heap. Summary
functions for this output are still being designed.
Running the example from the previous section with
Rprofmem(boot.memprof,threshold=1000)
storm.boot - boot(rs, storm.bf, R = 4999)
Rprofmem(NULL)
shows that apart from some initial and final work in boot there are no vector allocations over
1000 bytes.

3.3.3 Tracing copies of an object
The third method of memory profiling involves tracing copies made of a specific (presumably
large) R object. Calling tracemem on an object marks it so that a message is printed to standard
output when the object is copied via duplicate or coercion to another type, or when a new
object of the same size is created in arithmetic operations. The main reason that this can be
misleading is that copying of subsets or components of an object is not tracked. It may be
helpful to use tracemem on these components.
In the example above we can run tracemem on the data frame st
tracemem(st)
[1] 0x9abd5e0
storm.boot - boot(rs, storm.bf, R = 4)
memtrace[0x9abd5e0-0x92a6d08]: statistic boot
memtrace[0x92a6d08-0x92a6d80]: $-.data.frame $- statistic boot
memtrace[0x92a6d80-0x92a6df8]: $-.data.frame $- statistic boot
memtrace[0x9abd5e0-0x9271318]: statistic boot
memtrace[0x9271318-0x9271390]: $-.data.frame $- statistic boot
memtrace[0x9271390-0x9271408]: $-.data.frame $- statistic boot
memtrace[0x9abd5e0-0x914f558]: statistic boot
memtrace[0x914f558-0x914f5f8]: $-.data.frame $- statistic boot
memtrace[0x914f5f8-0x914f670]: $-.data.frame $- statistic boot
memtrace[0x9abd5e0-0x972cbf0]: statistic boot
memtrace[0x972cbf0-0x972cc68]: $-.data.frame $- statistic boot
memtrace[0x972cc68-0x972cd08]: $-.data.frame $- statistic boot
memtrace[0x9abd5e0-0x98ead98]: statistic boot
memtrace[0x98ead98-0x98eae10]: $-.data.frame $- statistic boot
memtrace[0x98eae10-0x98eae88]: $-.data.frame $- statistic boot
The object is duplicated fifteen times, three times for each of the R+1 calls to storm.bf. This
is surprising, since none of the duplications happen inside nls. Stepping through storm.bf in
the debugger shows that all three happen in the line
st$Time - st$fit + rs[i]
Data frames are slower than matrices and this is an example of why. Using
tracemem(st$Viscosity) does not reveal any additional copying.

3.4 Profiling compiled code
Profiling compiled code is highly system-specific, but this section contains some hints gleaned
from various R users. Some methods need to be different for a compiled executable and for


dynamic/shared libraries/objects as used by R packages. We know of no good way to profile
DLLs on Windows.

3.4.1 Linux
Options include using sprof for a shared object, and oprofile (see http://
oprofile.sourceforge.net/) for any executable or shared object.

3.4.1.1 sprof
You can select shared objects to be profiled with sprof by setting the environment variable
LD_PROFILE. For example
% setenv LD_PROFILE /path/to/R_HOME/library/stats/libs/stats.so
R
... run the boot example
% sprof /path/to/R_HOME/library/stats/libs/stats.so
/var/tmp/path/to/R_HOME/library/stats/libs/stats.so.profile

Flat profile:

Each sample counts as 0.01 seconds.
% cumulative self self total
time seconds seconds calls us/call us/call name
76.19 0.32 0.32 0 0.00 numeric_deriv
16.67 0.39 0.07 0 0.00 nls_iter
7.14 0.42 0.03 0 0.00 getListElement

rm /path/to/R_HOME/library/stats/libs/stats.so.profile
... to clean up ...
It is possible that root access is needed to create the directories used for the profile data.

3.4.1.2 oprofile
oprofile works by running a daemon which collects information. The daemon must be started
as root, e.g.
% su
% opcontrol --no-vmlinux
% (optional, some platforms) opcontrol --callgraph=5
% opcontrol --start
% exit
Then as a user
% R
... run the boot example
% opcontrol --dump
% opreport -l /path/to/R_HOME/library/stats/libs/stats.so
...
samples % symbol name
1623 75.5939 anonymous symbol from section .plt
349 16.2552 numeric_deriv
113 5.2632 nls_iter
62 2.8878 getListElement
% opreport -l /path/to/R_HOME/bin/exec/R
...


samples % symbol name
76052 11.9912 Rf_eval
54670 8.6198 Rf_findVarInFrame3
37814 5.9622 Rf_allocVector
31489 4.9649 Rf_duplicate
28221 4.4496 Rf_protect
26485 4.1759 Rf_cons
23650 3.7289 Rf_matchArgs
21088 3.3250 Rf_findFun
19995 3.1526 findVarLocInFrame
14871 2.3447 Rf_evalList
13794 2.1749 R_Newhashpjw
13522 2.1320 R_gc_internal
...
Shutting down the profiler and clearing the records needs to be done as root. You can use
opannotate to annotate the source code with the times spent in each section, if the appropriate
source code was compiled with debugging support, and opreport -c to generate a callgraph (if
collection was enabled and the platform supports this).

3.4.2 Solaris
On 64-bit (only) Solaris, the standard profiling tool gprof collects information from shared
libraries compiled with ‘-pg’.

3.4.3 Mac OS X
Developers have recommended sample (or Sampler.app, which is a GUI version) and Shark
(see http://developer.apple.com/tools/sharkoptimize.html and http://developer.
apple.com/tools/shark_optimize.html).

Chapter 4: Debugging 57

4 Debugging
This chapter covers the debugging of R extensions, starting with the ways to get useful
error information and moving on to how to deal with errors that crash R. For those who
prefer other styles there are contributed packages such as debug on CRAN (described
in an article in R-News 3/3). (There are notes from 2002 provided by Roger Peng
at http://www.biostat.jhsph.edu/~rpeng/docs/R-debug-tools.pdf which provide
complementary examples to those given here.)

4.1 Browsing
Most of the R-level debugging facilities are based around the built-in browser. This can be
used directly by inserting a call to browser() into the code of a function (for example, using
fix(my_function) ). When code execution reaches that point in the function, control returns
to the R console with a special prompt. For example
fix(summary.data.frame) ## insert browser() call after for() loop
summary(women)
Called from: summary.data.frame(women)
Browse[1] ls()
[1] digits i lbs lw maxsum nm nr nv
[9] object sms z
Browse[1] maxsum
[1] 7
Browse[1]
height weight
Min. :58.0 Min. :115.0
1st Qu.:61.5 1st Qu.:124.5
Median :65.0 Median :135.0
Mean :65.0 Mean :136.7
3rd Qu.:68.5 3rd Qu.:148.0
Max. :72.0 Max. :164.0
rm(summary.data.frame)
At the browser prompt one can enter any R expression, so for example ls() lists the objects in
the current frame, and entering the name of an object will1 print it. The following commands
are also accepted
• n
Enter ‘step-through’ mode. In this mode, hitting return executes the next line of code
(more precisely one line and any continuation lines). Typing c will continue to the end of
the current context, e.g. to the end of the current loop or function.
• c
In normal mode, this quits the browser and continues execution, and just return works in
the same way. cont is a synonym.
• where
This prints the call stack. For example
summary(women)
Called from: summary.data.frame(women)
Browse[1] where
where 1: summary.data.frame(women)
1
With the exceptions of the commands listed below: an object of such a name can be printed via an explicit
call to print.


where 2: summary(women)

Browse[1]
• Q
Quit both the browser and the current expression, and return to the top-level prompt.
Errors in code executed at the browser prompt will normally return control to the browser
prompt. Objects can be altered by assignment, and will keep their changed values when the
browser is exited. If really necessary, objects can be assigned to the workspace from the browser
prompt (by using - if the name is not already in scope).

4.2 Debugging R code
Suppose your R program gives an error message. The first thing to find out is what R was doing
at the time of the error, and the most useful tool is traceback(). We suggest that this is run
whenever the cause of the error is not immediately obvious. Daily, errors are reported to the R
mailing lists as being in some package when traceback() would show that the error was being
reported by some other package or base R. Here is an example from the regression suite.
success - c(13,12,11,14,14,11,13,11,12)
failure - c(0,0,0,0,0,0,0,2,2)
resp - cbind(success, failure)
predictor - c(0, 5^(0:7))
glm(resp ~ 0+predictor, family = binomial(link=log))
Error: no valid set of coefficients has been found: please supply starting values
traceback()
3: stop(no valid set of coefficients has been found: please supply
starting values, call. = FALSE)
2: glm.fit(x = X, y = Y, weights = weights, start = start, etastart = etastart,
mustart = mustart, offset = offset, family = family, control = control,
intercept = attr(mt, intercept) 0)
1: glm(resp ~ 0 + predictor, family = binomial(link =log))
The calls to the active frames are given in reverse order (starting with the innermost). So we
see the error message comes from an explicit check in glm.fit. (traceback() shows you all the
lines of the function calls, which can be limited by setting option ‘deparse.max.lines’.)
Sometimes the traceback will indicate that the error was detected inside compiled code, for
example (from ?nls)
Error in nls(y ~ a + b * x, start = list(a = 0.12345, b = 0.54321), trace = TRUE) :
step factor 0.000488281 reduced below ’minFactor’ of 0.000976563
traceback()
2: .Call(R_nls_iter, m, ctrl, trace)
1: nls(y ~ a + b * x, start = list(a = 0.12345, b = 0.54321), trace = TRUE)
This will be the case if the innermost call is to .C, .Fortran, .Call, .External or .Internal,
but as it is also possible for such code to evaluate R expressions, this need not be the innermost
call, as in
traceback()
9: gm(a, b, x)
8: .Call(R_numeric_deriv, expr, theta, rho, dir)
7: numericDeriv(form[[3]], names(ind), env)
6: getRHS()
5: assign(rhs, getRHS(), envir = thisEnv)
4: assign(resid, .swts * (lhs - assign(rhs, getRHS(), envir = thisEnv)),
envir = thisEnv)
3: function (newPars)
{
setPars(newPars)
assign(resid, .swts * (lhs - assign(rhs, getRHS(), envir = thisEnv)),
envir = thisEnv)


assign(dev, sum(resid^2), envir = thisEnv)
assign(QR, qr(.swts * attr(rhs, gradient)), envir = thisEnv)
return(QR$rank min(dim(QR$qr)))
}(c(-0.00760232418963883, 1.00119632515036))
2: .Call(R_nls_iter, m, ctrl, trace)
1: nls(yeps ~ gm(a, b, x), start = list(a = 0.12345, b = 0.54321))
Occasionally traceback() does not help, and this can be the case if S4 method dispatch is
involved. Consider the following example
xyd - new(xyloc, x=runif(20), y=runif(20))
Error in as.environment(pkg) : no item called package:S4nswv
on the search list
Error in initialize(value, ...) : S language method selection got
an error when called from internal dispatch for function ’initialize’
traceback()
2: initialize(value, ...)
1: new(xyloc, x = runif(20), y = runif(20))
which does not help much, as there is no call to as.environment in initialize (and the note
“called from internal dispatch” tells us so). In this case we searched the R sources for the quoted
call, which occurred in only one place, methods:::.asEnvironmentPackage. So now we knew
where the error was occurring. (This was an unusually opaque example.)
The error message
evaluation nested too deeply: infinite recursion / options(expressions=)?
can be hard to handle with the default value (5000). Unless you know that there actually is
deep recursion going on, it can help to set something like
options(expressions=500)
and re-run the example showing the error.
Sometimes there is warning that clearly is the precursor to some later error, but it is not
obvious where it is coming from. Setting options(warn = 2) (which turns warnings into errors)
can help here.
Once we have located the error, we have some choices. One way to proceed is to find out
more about what was happening at the time of the crash by looking a post-mortem dump. To
do so, set options(error=dump.frames) and run the code again. Then invoke debugger() and
explore the dump. Continuing our example:
options(error = dump.frames)
glm(resp ~ 0 + predictor, family = binomial(link =log))
which is the same as before, but an object called last.dump has appeared in the workspace.
(Such objects can be large, so remove it when it is no longer needed.) We can examine this at
a later time by calling the function debugger.
debugger()
Message: Error: no valid set of coefficients has been found: please supply starting values
Available environments had calls:
1: glm(resp ~ 0 + predictor, family = binomial(link = log))
2: glm.fit(x = X, y = Y, weights = weights, start = start, etastart = etastart, mus
3: stop(no valid set of coefficients has been found: please supply starting values
Enter an environment number, or 0 to exit Selection:
which gives the same sequence of calls as traceback, but in outer-first order and with only the
first line of the call, truncated to the current width. However, we can now examine in more
detail what was happening at the time of the error. Selecting an environment opens the browser
in that frame. So we select the function call which spawned the error message, and explore some
of the variables (and execute two function calls).


Enter an environment number, or 0 to exit Selection: 2
Browsing in the environment with call:
glm.fit(x = X, y = Y, weights = weights, start = start, etas
Called from: debugger.look(ind)
Browse[1] ls()
[1] aic boundary coefold control conv
[6] dev dev.resids devold EMPTY eta
[11] etastart family fit good intercept
[16] iter linkinv mu mu.eta mu.eta.val
[21] mustart n ngoodobs nobs nvars
[26] offset start valideta validmu variance
[31] varmu w weights x xnames
[36] y ynames z
Browse[1] eta
1 2 3 4 5
0.000000e+00 -2.235357e-06 -1.117679e-05 -5.588393e-05 -2.794197e-04
6 7 8 9
-1.397098e-03 -6.985492e-03 -3.492746e-02 -1.746373e-01
Browse[1] valideta(eta)
[1] TRUE
Browse[1] mu
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
1.0000000 0.9999978 0.9999888 0.9999441 0.9997206 0.9986039 0.9930389 0.9656755
9
0.8397616
Browse[1] validmu(mu)
[1] FALSE
Browse[1] c
Available environments had calls:
2: glm.fit(x = X, y = Y, weights = weights, start = start, etastart = etastart
3: stop(no valid set of coefficients has been found: please supply starting v

Enter an environment number, or 0 to exit Selection: 0
rm(last.dump)

Because last.dump can be looked at later or even in another R session, post-mortem debug-
ging is possible even for batch usage of R. We do need to arrange for the dump to be saved:
this can be done either using the command-line flag ‘--save’ to save the workspace at the end
of the run, or via a setting such as
options(error = quote({dump.frames(to.file=TRUE); q()}))
See the help on dump.frames for further options and a worked example.
An alternative error action is to use the function recover():
options(error = recover)
glm(resp ~ 0 + predictor, family = binomial(link = log))

Enter a frame number, or 0 to exit

2: glm.fit(x = X, y = Y, weights = weights, start = start, etastart = etastart

Selection:

which is very similar to dump.frames. However, we can examine the state of the program
directly, without dumping and re-loading the dump. As its help page says, recover can be
routinely used as the error action in place of dump.calls and dump.frames, since it behaves
like dump.frames in non-interactive use.
Post-mortem debugging is good for finding out exactly what went wrong, but not necessarily
why. An alternative approach is to take a closer look at what was happening just before the


error, and a good way to do that is to use debug. This inserts a call to the browser at the
beginning of the function, starting in step-through mode. So in our example we could use
debug(glm.fit)
debugging in: glm.fit(x = X, y = Y, weights = weights, start = start, etastart = etastart,
mustart = mustart, offset = offset, family = family, control = control,
intercept = attr(mt, intercept) 0)
debug: {
## lists the whole function
Browse[1]
debug: x - as.matrix(x)
...
Browse[1] start
[1] -2.235357e-06
debug: eta - drop(x %*% start)
Browse[1] eta
1 2 3 4 5
0.000000e+00 -2.235357e-06 -1.117679e-05 -5.588393e-05 -2.794197e-04
6 7 8 9
-1.397098e-03 -6.985492e-03 -3.492746e-02 -1.746373e-01
Browse[1]
debug: mu - linkinv(eta - eta + offset)
Browse[1] mu
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
1.0000000 0.9999978 0.9999888 0.9999441 0.9997206 0.9986039 0.9930389 0.9656755
9
0.8397616
(The prompt Browse[1] indicates that this is the first level of browsing: it is possible to step
into another function that is itself being debugged or contains a call to browser().)
debug can be used for hidden functions and S3 methods by e.g.
debug(stats:::predict.Arima). (It cannot be used for S4 methods, but an alter-
native is given on the help page for debug.) Sometimes you want to debug a function defined
inside another function, e.g. the function arimafn defined inside arima. To do so, set debug on
the outer function (here arima) and step through it until the inner function has been defined.
Then call debug on the inner function (and use c to get out of step-through mode in the outer
function).
To remove debugging of a function, call undebug with the argument previously given to
debug; debugging otherwise lasts for the rest of the R session (or until the function is edited or
otherwise replaced).
trace can be used to temporarily insert debugging code into a function, for example to insert
a call to browser() just before the point of the error. To return to our running example
## first get a numbered listing of the expressions of the function
page(as.list(body(glm.fit)), method=print)
trace(glm.fit, browser, at=22)
Tracing function glm.fit in package stats
[1] glm.fit
Tracing glm.fit(x = X, y = Y, weights = weights, start = start,
etastart = etastart, .... step 22
Called from: eval(expr, envir, enclos)
Browse[1] n
## and single-step from here.
untrace(glm.fit)
For your own functions, it may be as easy to use fix to insert temporary code, but trace
can help with functions in a name space (as can fixInNamespace). Alternatively, use
trace(,edit=TRUE) to insert code visually.


4.3 Using gctorture and valgrind
Errors in memory allocation and reading/writing outside arrays are very common causes of
crashes (e.g., segfaults) on some machines. Often the crash appears long after the invalid memory
access: in particular damage to the structures which R itself has allocated may only become
apparent at the next garbage collection (or even at later garbage collections after objects have
been deleted).

4.3.1 Using gctorture
We can help to detect memory problems earlier by running garbage collection as often as possible.
This is achieved by gctorture(TRUE), which as described on its help page
Provokes garbage collection on (nearly) every memory allocation. Intended to ferret
out memory protection bugs. Also makes R run very slowly, unfortunately.
The reference to ‘memory protection’ is to missing C-level calls to PROTECT/UNPROTECT (see
Section 5.9.1 [Garbage Collection], page 79) which if missing allow R objects to be garbage-
collected when they are still in use. But it can also help with other memory-related errors.
Normally running under gctorture(TRUE) will just produce a crash earlier in the R program,
hopefully close to the actual cause. See the next section for how to decipher such crashes.
It is possible to run all the examples, tests and vignettes covered by R CMD check under
gctorture(TRUE) by using the option ‘--use-gct’.

4.3.2 Using valgrind
If you have access to Linux on an ‘ix86’, ‘x86_64’, ‘ppc32’ or ‘ppc64’ platform, or Mac OS
10.5.x (‘Leopard’) on ‘i386’ you can use valgrind (http://www.valgrind.org/, pronounced
to rhyme with ‘tinned’) to check for possible problems. To run some examples under valgrind
use something like
R -d valgrind --vanilla mypkg-Ex.R
R -d valgrind --tool=memcheck --leak-check=full --vanilla mypkg-Ex.R
where ‘mypkg-Ex.R’ is a set of examples, e.g. the file created in ‘mypkg.Rcheck’ by R CMD check.
Occasionally this reports memory reads of ‘uninitialised values’ that are the result of compiler
optimization, so can be worth checking under an unoptimized compile. We know there will be
some small memory leaks from readline and R itself — these are memory areas that are in
use right up to the end of the R session. Expect this to run around 20x slower than without
valgrind, and in some cases even slower than that. Earlier versions (at least) of valgrind are
not happy with many optimized BLASes that use CPU-specific instructions (3D now, SSE, SSE2,
SSE3 and similar) so you may need to build a version of R specifically to use with valgrind.
On platforms supported by valgrind you can build a version of R with extra instrumentation
to help valgrind detect errors in the use of memory allocated from the R heap. The configure
option is ‘--with-valgrind-instrumentation=level ’, where level is 0, 1, or 2. Level 0 is the
default and does not add any anything. Level 1 will detect use of uninitialised memory and has
little impact on speed. Level 2 will detect many other memory use bugs but makes R much
slower when running under valgrind. Using this in conjunction with gctorture can be even
more effective (and even slower).
An example of valgrind output is
==12539== Invalid read of size 4
==12539== at 0x1CDF6CBE: csc_compTr (Mutils.c:273)
==12539== by 0x1CE07E1E: tsc_transpose (dtCMatrix.c:25)
==12539== by 0x80A67A7: do_dotcall (dotcode.c:858)
==12539== by 0x80CACE2: Rf_eval (eval.c:400)
==12539== by 0x80CB5AF: R_execClosure (eval.c:658)
==12539== by 0x80CB98E: R_execMethod (eval.c:760)
==12539== by 0x1B93DEFA: R_standardGeneric (methods_list_dispatch.c:624)


==12539== by 0x810262E: do_standardGeneric (objects.c:1012)
==12539== by 0x80CAD23: Rf_eval (eval.c:403)
==12539== by 0x80CB2F0: Rf_applyClosure (eval.c:573)
==12539== by 0x80CADCC: Rf_eval (eval.c:414)
==12539== by 0x80CAA03: Rf_eval (eval.c:362)
==12539== Address 0x1C0D2EA8 is 280 bytes inside a block of size 1996 alloc’d
==12539== at 0x1B9008D1: malloc (vg_replace_malloc.c:149)
==12539== by 0x80F1B34: GetNewPage (memory.c:610)
==12539== by 0x80F7515: Rf_allocVector (memory.c:1915)
...
This example is from an instrumented version of R, while tracking down a bug in the Matrix
package in January, 2006. The first line indicates that R has tried to read 4 bytes from a
memory address that it does not have access to. This is followed by a C stack trace showing
where the error occurred. Next is a description of the memory that was accessed. It is inside
a block allocated by malloc, called from GetNewPage, that is, in the internal R heap. Since
this memory all belongs to R, valgrind would not (and did not) detect the problem in an
uninstrumented build of R. In this example the stack trace was enough to isolate and fix the
bug, which was in tsc_transpose, and in this example running under gctorture() did not
provide any additional information. When the stack trace is not sufficiently informative the
option ‘--db-attach=yes’ to valgrind may be helpful. This starts a post-mortem debugger
(by default gdb) so that variables in the C code can be inspected (see Section 4.4.2 [Inspecting
R objects], page 65).
It is possible to run all the examples, tests and vignettes covered by R CMD check under
valgrind by using the option ‘--use-valgrind’. If you do this you will need to select the
valgrind options some other way, for example by having a ‘~/.valgrindrc’ file containing
--tool=memcheck
--memcheck:leak-check=full
or setting the environment variable VALGRIND_OPTS.

4.4 Debugging compiled code
Sooner or later programmers will be faced with the need to debug compiled code loaded into R.
This section is geared to platforms using gdb with code compiled by gcc, but similar things are
possible with front-ends to gdb such as ddd and insight, and other debuggers such as Sun’s
dbx.
Consider first ‘crashes’, that is when R terminated unexpectedly with an illegal memory
access (a ‘segfault’ or ‘bus error’), illegal instruction or similar. Unix-alike versions of R use a
signal handler which aims to give some basic information. For example
*** caught segfault ***
address 0x20000028, cause ’memory not mapped’

Traceback:
1: .identC(class1[[1]], class2)
2: possibleExtends(class(sloti), classi, ClassDef2 = getClassDef(classi,
where = where))
3: validObject(t(cu))
4: stopifnot(validObject(cu - as(tu, dtCMatrix)), validObject(t(cu)),
validObject(t(tu)))

Possible actions:
1: abort (with core dump)
2: normal R exit
3: exit R without saving workspace


4: exit R saving workspace
Selection: 3
Since the R process may be damaged, the only really safe option is the first.
Another cause of a ‘crash’ is to overrun the C stack. R tries to track that in its own code,
but it may happen in third-party compiled code. For modern POSIX-compliant OSes we can
safely catch that and return to the top-level prompt.
.C(aaa)
Error: segfault from C stack overflow

However, C stack overflows are fatal under Windows and normally defeat attempts at debugging
on that platform.
If you have a crash which gives a core dump you can use something like
gdb /path/to/R/bin/exec/R core.12345
to examine the core dump. If core dumps are disabled or to catch errors that do not generate a
dump one can run R directly under a debugger by for example
$ R -d gdb --vanilla
...
gdb run
at which point R will run normally, and hopefully the debugger will catch the error and return
to its prompt. This can also be used to catch infinite loops or interrupt very long-running code.
For a simple example
for(i in 1:1e7) x - rnorm(100)
[hit Ctrl-C]
Program received signal SIGINT, Interrupt.
0x00397682 in _int_free () from /lib/tls/libc.so.6
(gdb) where
#0 0x00397682 in _int_free () from /lib/tls/libc.so.6
#1 0x00397eba in free () from /lib/tls/libc.so.6
#2 0xb7cf2551 in R_gc_internal (size_needed=313)
at /users/ripley/R/svn/R-devel/src/main/memory.c:743
#3 0xb7cf3617 in Rf_allocVector (type=13, length=626)
at /users/ripley/R/svn/R-devel/src/main/memory.c:1906
#4 0xb7c3f6d3 in PutRNGstate ()
at /users/ripley/R/svn/R-devel/src/main/RNG.c:351
#5 0xb7d6c0a5 in do_random2 (call=0x94bf7d4, op=0x92580e8, args=0x9698f98,
rho=0x9698f28) at /users/ripley/R/svn/R-devel/src/main/random.c:183
...
Some “tricks” are worth knowing.

4.4.1 Finding entry points in dynamically loaded code
Under most compilation environments, compiled code dynamically loaded into R cannot have
breakpoints set within it until it is loaded. To use a symbolic debugger on such dynamically
loaded code under Unix-alikes use
• Call the debugger on the R executable, for example by R -d gdb.
• Start R.
• At the R prompt, use dyn.load or library to load your shared object.
• Send an interrupt signal. This will put you back to the debugger prompt.
• Set the breakpoints in your code.


• Continue execution of R by typing signal 0RET.

Under Windows signals may not be able to be used, and if so the procedure is more com-
plicated. See the rw-FAQ and www.stats.uwo.ca/faculty/murdoch/software/debuggingR/
gdb.shtml.

4.4.2 Inspecting R objects when debugging
The key to inspecting R objects from compiled code is the function PrintValue(SEXP s ) which
uses the normal R printing mechanisms to print the R object pointed to by s, or the safer version
R_PV(SEXP s ) which will only print ‘objects’.

One way to make use of PrintValue is to insert suitable calls into the code to be debugged.

Another way is to call R_PV from the symbolic debugger. (PrintValue is hidden as Rf_
PrintValue.) For example, from gdb we can use

(gdb) p R_PV(ab)

using the object ab from the convolution example, if we have placed a suitable breakpoint in
the convolution C code.

To examine an arbitrary R object we need to work a little harder. For example, let

R DF - data.frame(a = 1:3, b = 4:6)

By setting a breakpoint at do_get and typing get(DF) at the R prompt, one can find out the
address in memory of DF, for example

Value returned is $1 = (SEXPREC *) 0x40583e1c
(gdb) p *$1
$2 = {
sxpinfo = {type = 19, obj = 1, named = 1, gp = 0,
mark = 0, debug = 0, trace = 0, = 0},
attrib = 0x40583e80,
u = {
vecsxp = {
length = 2,
type = {c = 0x40634700 0X@DX@0X@, i = 0x40634700,
f = 0x40634700, z = 0x40634700, s = 0x40634700},
truelength = 1075851272,
},
primsxp = {offset = 2},
symsxp = {pname = 0x2, value = 0x40634700, internal = 0x40203008},
listsxp = {carval = 0x2, cdrval = 0x40634700, tagval = 0x40203008},
envsxp = {frame = 0x2, enclos = 0x40634700},
closxp = {formals = 0x2, body = 0x40634700, env = 0x40203008},
promsxp = {value = 0x2, expr = 0x40634700, env = 0x40203008}
}
}

(Debugger output reformatted for better legibility).

Using R_PV() one can “inspect” the values of the various elements of the SEXP, for example,


(gdb) p R_PV($1-attrib)
$names
[1] a b

$row.names
[1] 1 2 3

$class
[1] data.frame

$3 = void
To find out where exactly the corresponding information is stored, one needs to go “deeper”:
(gdb) set $a = $1-attrib
(gdb) p $a-u.listsxp.tagval-u.symsxp.pname-u.vecsxp.type.c
$4 = 0x405d40e8 names
(gdb) p $a-u.listsxp.carval-u.vecsxp.type.s[1]-u.vecsxp.type.c
$5 = 0x40634378 b
(gdb) p $1-u.vecsxp.type.s[0]-u.vecsxp.type.i[0]
$6 = 1
(gdb) p $1-u.vecsxp.type.s[1]-u.vecsxp.type.i[1]
$7 = 5

Chapter 5: System and foreign language interfaces 67

5 System and foreign language interfaces

5.1 Operating system access
Access to operating system functions is via the R function system. The details will differ
by platform (see the on-line help), and about all that can safely be assumed is that the first
argument will be a string command that will be passed for execution (not necessarily by a shell)
and the second argument will be internal which if true will collect the output of the command
into an R character vector.
The function system.time is available for timing (although the information available may
be limited on non-Unix-like platforms: these days only on the obsolete Windows 9x/ME).

5.2 Interface functions .C and .Fortran
These two functions provide a standard interface to compiled code that has been linked into
R, either at build time or via dyn.load (see Section 5.3 [dyn.load and dyn.unload], page 69).
They are primarily intended for compiled C and FORTRAN 77 code respectively, but the .C
function can be used with other languages which can generate C interfaces, for example C++
(see Section 5.6 [Interfacing C++ code], page 73).
The first argument to each function is a character string given the symbol name as known
to C or FORTRAN, that is the function or subroutine name. (That the symbol is loaded
can be tested by, for example, is.loaded(cg): it is no longer necessary nor correct to use
symbol.For, which is defunct as from R 2.5.0.) (Note that the underscore is not a valid character
in a FORTRAN 77 subprogram name, and on versions of R prior to 2.4.0 .Fortran may not
correctly translate names containing underscores.)
There can be up to 65 further arguments giving R objects to be passed to compiled code.
Normally these are copied before being passed in, and copied again to an R list object when
the compiled code returns. If the arguments are given names, these are used as names for the
components in the returned list object (but not passed to the compiled code).
The following table gives the mapping between the modes of R vectors and the types of
arguments to a C function or FORTRAN subroutine.

R storage mode C type FORTRAN type
logical int * INTEGER
integer int * INTEGER
double double * DOUBLE PRECISION
complex Rcomplex * DOUBLE COMPLEX
character char ** CHARACTER*255
raw unsigned char * none
Do please note the first two. On the 64-bit Unix/Linux platforms, long is 64-bit whereas
int and INTEGER are 32-bit. Code ported from S-PLUS (which uses long * for logical and
integer) will not work on all 64-bit platforms (although it may appear to work on some). Note
also that if your compiled code is a mixture of C functions and FORTRAN subprograms the
argument types must match as given in the table above.
C type Rcomplex is a structure with double members r and i defined in the header file
‘R_ext/Complex.h’ included by ‘R.h’. (On most platforms which have it, this is compatible
withe C99 double complex type.) Only a single character string can be passed to or from
FORTRAN, and the success of this is compiler-dependent. Other R objects can be passed to
.C, but it is better to use one of the other interfaces. An exception is passing an R function for
use with call_R, when the object can be handled as void * en route to call_R, but even there


.Call is to be preferred. Similarly, passing an R list as an argument to a C routine should be
done using the .Call interface. If one does use the .C function to pass a list as an argument,
it is visible to the routine as an array in C of SEXP types (i.e., SEXP *). The elements of the
array correspond directly to the elements of the R list. However, this array must be treated
as read-only and one must not assign values to its elements within the C routine — doing so
bypasses R’s memory management facilities and will corrupt the object and the R session.
It is possible to pass numeric vectors of storage mode double to C as float * or to FORTRAN
as REAL by setting the attribute Csingle, most conveniently by using the R functions as.single,
single or mode. This is intended only to be used to aid interfacing to existing C or FORTRAN
code.
Unless formal argument NAOK is true, all the other arguments are checked for missing values
NA and for the IEEE special values NaN, Inf and -Inf, and the presence of any of these generates
an error. If it is true, these values are passed unchecked.
Argument DUP can be used to suppress copying. It is dangerous: see the on-line help for
arguments against its use. It is not possible to pass numeric vectors as float * or REAL if
DUP=FALSE, and character vectors cannot be used.
Argument PACKAGE confines the search for the symbol name to a specific shared object (or
use base for code compiled into R). Its use is highly desirable, as there is no way to avoid two
package writers using the same symbol name, and such name clashes are normally sufficient to
cause R to crash. (If it is not present and the call is from the body of a function defined in a
package with a name space, the shared object loaded by the first (if any) useDynLib directive
will be used.)
For .C and .Fortran you can specify an ENCODING argument: this requests that (unless DUP
= FALSE) character vectors be re-encoded to the requested encoding before being passed in, and
re-encoded from the requested encoding when passed back. Note that encoding names are not
standardized, and not all R builds support re-encoding. But this can be useful to allow code to
work in a UTF-8 locale by specifying ENCODING = latin1.
Note that the compiled code should not return anything except through its arguments: C
functions should be of type void and FORTRAN subprograms should be subroutines.
To fix ideas, let us consider a very simple example which convolves two finite sequences.
(This is hard to do fast in interpreted R code, but easy in C code.) We could do this using .C
by
void convolve(double *a, int *na, double *b, int *nb, double *ab)
{
int i, j, nab = *na + *nb - 1;

for(i = 0; i nab; i++)
ab[i] = 0.0;
for(i = 0; i *na; i++)
for(j = 0; j *nb; j++)
ab[i + j] += a[i] * b[j];
}
called from R by
conv - function(a, b)
.C(convolve,
as.double(a),
as.integer(length(a)),
as.double(b),
as.integer(length(b)),
ab = double(length(a) + length(b) - 1))$ab


Note that we take care to coerce all the arguments to the correct R storage mode before
calling .C; mistakes in matching the types can lead to wrong results or hard-to-catch errors.
Special care is needed in handling character vector arguments in C (or C++). Since only
DUP = TRUE is allowed, on entry the contents of the elements are duplicated and assigned to the
elements of a char ** array, and on exit the elements of the C array are copied to create new
elements of a character vector. This means that the contents of the character strings of the
char ** array can be changed, including to 0 to shorten the string, but the strings cannot be
lengthened. It is possible to allocate a new string via R_alloc and replace an entry in the char
** array by the new string. However, when character vectors are used other than in a read-only
way, the .Call interface is much to be preferred.
Passing character strings to FORTRAN code needs even more care, and should be avoided
where possible. Only the first element of the character vector is passed in, as a fixed-length
(255) character array. Up to 255 characters are passed back to a length-one character vector.
How well this works (or even if it works at all) depends on the C and FORTRAN compilers on
each platform.

5.3 dyn.load and dyn.unload
Compiled code to be used with R is loaded as a shared object (Unix and Mac OS X, see
Section 5.5 [Creating shared objects], page 72 for more information) or DLL (Windows).
The shared object/DLL is loaded by dyn.load and unloaded by dyn.unload. Unloading is
not normally necessary, but it is needed to allow the DLL to be re-built on some platforms,
including Windows.
The first argument to both functions is a character string giving the path to the object.
Programmers should not assume a specific file extension for the object/DLL (such as ‘.so’) but
use a construction like
file.path(path1, path2, paste(mylib, .Platform$dynlib.ext, sep=))
for platform independence. On Unix-alike systems the path supplied to dyn.load can be an
absolute path, one relative to the current directory or, if it starts with ‘~’, relative to the user’s
home directory.
Loading is most often done via a call to library.dynam in the .First.lib function of a
package. This has the form
library.dynam(libname, package, lib.loc)
where libname is the object/DLL name with the extension omitted. Note that the first argument,
chname, should not be package since this will not work if the package is installed under another
name (as it will be with a versioned install).
Under some Unix-alike systems there is a choice of how the symbols are resolved when the
object is loaded, governed by the arguments local and now. Only use these if really neces-
sary: in particular using now=FALSE and then calling an unresolved symbol will terminate R
unceremoniously.
R provides a way of executing some code automatically when a object/DLL is either loaded
or unloaded. This can be used, for example, to register native routines with R’s dynamic symbol
mechanism, initialize some data in the native code, or initialize a third party library. On loading
a DLL, R will look for a routine within that DLL named R_init_lib where lib is the name of
the DLL file with the extension removed. For example, in the command
library.dynam(mylib, package, lib.loc)
R looks for the symbol named R_init_mylib. Similarly, when unloading the object, R looks for
a routine named R_unload_lib , e.g., R_unload_mylib. In either case, if the routine is present,
R will invoke it and pass it a single argument describing the DLL. This is a value of type DllInfo
which is defined in the ‘Rdynload.h’ file in the ‘R_ext’ directory.


The following example shows templates for the initialization and unload routines for the
mylib DLL.
¨
#include R.h
#include Rinternals.h
#include R_ext/Rdynload.h

void
R_init_mylib(DllInfo *info)
{
/* Register routines, allocate resources. */
}

void
R_unload_mylib(DllInfo *info)
{
/* Release resources. */
}
©
If a shared object/DLL is loaded more than once the most recent version is used. More gen-
erally, if the same symbol name appears in several libraries, the most recently loaded occurrence
is used. The PACKAGE argument and registration (see the next section) provide good ways to
avoid any ambiguity in which occurrence is meant.
On Unix-alikes the paths used to resolve dynamically linked dependent libraries are fixed (for
security reasons) when the process is launched, so dyn.load will only look for such libraries in
the locations set by the ‘R’ shell script (via ‘etc/ldpaths’) and in the OS-specific defaults.
Windows allows more control (and less security) over where dependent DLLs are looked for.
On all versions this includes the PATH environment variable, but with lowest priority: note that
it does not include the directory from which the DLL was loaded. On XP and later it is possible1
to add a single path with quite high priority via the DLLpath argument to dyn.load. This is
(by default) used by library.dynam to include the package’s ‘libs’ directory in the DLL search
path.

5.4 Registering native routines
By ‘native’ routine, we mean an entry point in compiled code.
In calls to .C, .Call, .Fortran and .External, R must locate the specified native routine by
looking in the appropriate shared object/DLL. By default, R uses the operating system-specific
dynamic loader to lookup the symbol. Alternatively, the author of the DLL can explicitly register
routines with R and use a single, platform-independent mechanism for finding the routines in
the DLL. One can use this registration mechanism to provide additional information about
a routine, including the number and type of the arguments, and also make it available to R
programmers under a different name. In the future, registration may be used to implement a
form of “secure” or limited native access.
To register routines with R, one calls the C routine R_registerRoutines. This is typically
done when the DLL is first loaded within the initialization routine R_init_dll name described
in Section 5.3 [dyn.load and dyn.unload], page 69. R_registerRoutines takes 5 arguments. The
first is the DllInfo object passed by R to the initialization routine. This is where R stores the
information about the methods. The remaining 4 arguments are arrays describing the routines
1
and we provide an emulation on Windows 2000: see ‘?dyn.load’.


for each of the 4 different interfaces: .C, .Call, .Fortran and .External. Each argument is a
NULL-terminated array of the element types given in the following table:
.C R_CMethodDef
.Call R_CallMethodDef
.Fortran R_FortranMethodDef
.External R_ExternalMethodDef
Currently, the R_ExternalMethodDef is the same as R_CallMethodDef type and contains
fields for the name of the routine by which it can be accessed in R, a pointer to the actual native
symbol (i.e., the routine itself), and the number of arguments the routine expects. For routines
with a variable number of arguments invoked via the .External interface, one specifies -1 for
the number of arguments which tells R not to check the actual number passed. For example, if
we had a routine named myCall defined as
SEXP myCall(SEXP a, SEXP b, SEXP c);
we would describe this as
R_CallMethodDef callMethods[] = {
{myCall, myCall, 3},
{NULL, NULL, 0}
};
along with any other routines for the .Call interface.
Routines for use with the .C and .Fortran interfaces are described with similar data struc-
tures, but which have two additional fields for describing the type and “style” of each argument.
Each of these can be omitted. However, if specified, each should be an array with the same
number of elements as the number of parameters for the routine. The types array should con-
tain the SEXP types describing the expected type of the argument. (Technically, the elements
of the types array are of type R_NativePrimitiveArgType which is just an unsigned integer.)
The R types and corresponding type identifiers are provided in the following table:
numeric REALSXP
integer INTSXP
logical LGLSXP
single SINGLESXP
character STRSXP
list VECSXP
Consider a C routine, myC, declared as
void myC(double *x, int *n, char **names, int *status);
We would register it as
R_CMethodDef cMethods[] = {
{myC, myC, 4, {REALSXP, INTSXP, STRSXP, LGLSXP}},
{NULL, NULL, 0}
};
One can also specify whether each argument is used simply as input, or as output, or as both
input and output. The style field in the description of a method is used for this. The purpose is
to allow R to transfer values more efficiently across the R-C/FORTRAN interface by avoiding
copying values when it is not necessary. Typically, one omits this information in the registration
data.
Having created the arrays describing each routine, the last step is to actually register them
with R. We do this by calling R_registerRoutines. For example, if we have the descriptions
above for the routines accessed by the .C and .Call we would use the following code:
void


R_init_myLib(DllInfo *info)
{
R_registerRoutines(info, cMethods, callMethods, NULL, NULL);
}
This routine will be invoked when R loads the shared object/DLL named myLib. The last
two arguments in the call to R_registerRoutines are for the routines accessed by .Fortran
and .External interfaces. In our example, these are given as NULL since we have no routines of
these types.
When R unloads a shared object/DLL, any registered routines are automatically removed.
There is no (direct) facility for unregistering a symbol.
Examples of registering routines can be found in the different packages in the R source tree
(e.g., stats). Also, there is a brief, high-level introduction in R News (volume 1/3, September
2001, pages 20-23).
In addition to registering C routines to be called by R, it can at times be useful for one
package to make some of its C routines available to be called by C code in another package. An
interface to support this has been provided since R 2.4.0. The interface consists of two routines
declared as
void R_RegisterCCallable(const char *package, const char *name,
DL_FUNC fptr);
DL_FUNC R_GetCCallable(const char *package, const char *name);
A package packA that wants to make a C routine myCfun available to C code in other packages
would include the call
R_RegisterCCallable(packA, myCfun, myCfun);
in its initialization function R_init_packA. A package packB that wants to use this routine
would retrieve the function pointer with a call of the form
p_myCfun = R_GetCCallable(packA, myCfun);
The author of packB is responsible for ensuring that p_myCfun has an appropriate declaration.
In the future R may provide some automated tools to simplify exporting larger numbers of
routines.
A package that wishes to make use of header files in other packages needs to declare them as
a comma-separated list in the field LinkingTo in the ‘DESCRIPTION’ file. For example
Depends: link2, link3
LinkingTo: link2, link3
It should also ‘Depend’ on those packages for they have to be installed prior to this one, and
loaded prior to this one (so the path to their compiled code can be found).
This then arranges that the ‘include’ directories in the installed linked-to packages are added
to the include paths for C and C++ code.
A CRAN example of the use of this mechanism is package lme4, which links to Matrix.

5.5 Creating shared objects
Shared objects for loading into R can be created using R CMD SHLIB. This accepts as arguments
a list of files which must be object files (with extension ‘.o’) or sources for C, C++, FORTRAN
77, Fortran 9x, Objective C or Objective C++ (with extensions ‘.c’, ‘.cc’ or ‘.cpp’ or ‘.C’, ‘.f’,
‘.f90’ or ‘.f95’, ‘.m’, and ‘.mm’ or ‘.M’, respectively), or commands to be passed to the linker.
See R CMD SHLIB --help (or the R help for SHLIB) for usage information.
If compiling the source files does not work “out of the box”, you can specify additional flags
by setting some of the variables PKG_CPPFLAGS (for the C preprocessor, typically ‘-I’ flags),
PKG_CFLAGS, PKG_CXXFLAGS, PKG_FFLAGS, PKG_FCFLAGS, and PKG_OBJCFLAGS (for the C, C++,


FORTRAN 77, Fortran 9x, and Objective C compilers, respectively) in the file ‘Makevars’ in
the compilation directory (or, of course, create the object files directly from the command line).
Similarly, variable PKG_LIBS in ‘Makevars’ can be used for additional ‘-l’ and ‘-L’ flags to be
passed to the linker when building the shared object. (Supplying linker commands as arguments
to R CMD SHLIB will override PKG_LIBS in ‘Makevars’.)
It is possible to arrange to include compiled code from other languages by setting the macro
‘OBJECTS’ in file ‘Makevars’, together with suitable rules to make the objects.
Flags which are already set (for example in file ‘etcR_ARCH /Makeconf’ on Unix-alikes) can
be overridden by the environment variable MAKEFLAGS (at least for systems using a POSIX-
compliant make), as in (Bourne shell syntax)
MAKEFLAGS=CFLAGS=-O3 R CMD SHLIB *.c
It is also possible to set such variables in personal ‘Makevars’ files, which are read after the
local ‘Makevars’ and the system makefiles. See undefined [R-admin], page undefined ,
Note that as R CMD SHLIB uses Make, it will not remake a shared object just because the flags
have changed, and if ‘test.c’ and ‘test.f’ both exist in the current directory
R CMD SHLIB test.f
will compile ‘test.c’!
If the ‘src’ subdirectory of an add-on package contains source code with one of the extensions
listed above or a file ‘Makevars’ but not a file Makefile, R CMD INSTALL creates a shared object
(for loading into R in the .First.lib or .onLoad function of the package) using the R CMD
SHLIB mechanism. If file ‘Makevars’ exists it is read first, then the system makefile and then
any personal ‘Makevars’ files.
If the ‘src’ subdirectory of package contains a file ‘Makefile’, this is used by R
CMD INSTALL in place of the R CMD SHLIB mechanism. make is called with makefiles
‘R_HOME /etcR_ARCH /Makeconf’, ‘src/Makefile’ and any personal ‘Makevars’ files (in that
order). The first target found in ‘src/Makefile’ is used.
It is better to make use of a Makevars file rather than a Makefile: the latter should be
needed only exceptionally.
Under Windows the same commands work, but ‘Makevars.win’ will be used in
preference to ‘Makevars’, and only ‘src/Makefile.win’ will be used by R CMD INSTALL with
‘src/Makefile’ being ignored. For details of building DLLs with a variety of compilers,
see file ‘README.packages’ and http://www.stats.uwo.ca/faculty/murdoch/software/
compilingDLLs/ . Under Windows you can supply an exports definitions file called
‘dllname-win.def’: otherwise all entry points in objects (but not libraries) supplied to R CMD
SHLIB will be exported from the DLL. An example is ‘stats-win.def’ for the stats package: a
CRAN example in package fastICA.
If you feel tempted to read the source code and subvert these mechanisms, please resist. Far
too much developer time has been wasted in chasing down errors caused by failures to follow
this documentation, and even more by package authors demanding explanations as to why their
packages not longer work. In particular, undocumented environment or make variables are not
for use by package writers and are subject to change without notice.

5.6 Interfacing C++ code
Suppose we have the following hypothetical C++ library, consisting of the two files ‘X.hh’ and
‘X.cc’, and implementing the two classes X and Y which we want to use in R.

¨
// X.hh

class X {
public: X (); ~X ();
};

class Y {
public: Y (); ~Y ();
};
©
¨
// X.cc

#include iostream
#include X.hh

static Y y;

X::X() { std::cout constructor X std::endl; }
X::~X() { std::cout destructor X std::endl; }
Y::Y() { std::cout constructor Y std::endl; }
Y::~Y() { std::cout destructor Y std::endl; }
©

To use with R, the only thing we have to do is writing a wrapper function and ensuring that
the function is enclosed in

extern C {

}

For example,
¨
// X_main.cc:

#include X.hh

extern C {

void X_main () {
X x;
}

} // extern C
©

Compiling and linking should be done with the C++ compiler-linker (rather than the C
compiler-linker or the linker itself); otherwise, the C++ initialization code (and hence the con-
structor of the static variable Y) are not called. On a properly configured system, one can simply
use

R CMD SHLIB X.cc X_main.cc

to create the shared object, typically ‘X.so’ (the file name extension may be different on your
platform). Now starting R yields


R : Copyright 2000, The R Development Core Team
Version 1.1.0 Under development (unstable) (April 14, 2000)
...
Type q() to quit R.

R dyn.load(paste(X, .Platform$dynlib.ext, sep = ))
constructor Y
R .C(X_main)
constructor X
destructor X
list()
R q()
Save workspace image? [y/n/c]: y
destructor Y
The R for Windows FAQ (‘rw-FAQ’) contains details of how to compile this example under
various Windows compilers.
Using C++ iostreams, as in this example, is best avoided. There is no guarantee that the
output will appear in the R console, and indeed it will not on the R for Windows console. Use
R code or the C entry points (see Section 6.5 [Printing], page 103) for all I/O if at all possible.
Most R header files can be included within C++ programs, and they should not be included
within an extern C block (as they include C++ system headers). It may not be possible to
include some R headers as they in turn include C header files that may cause conflicts—if this
happens, define ‘NO_C_HEADERS’ before including the R headers, and include C++ versions (such
as ‘cmath’) of the appropriate headers yourself before the R headers.

5.7 Fortran I/O
We have already warned against the use of C++ iostreams not least because output is not
guaranteed to appear on the R console, and this warning applies equally to Fortran (77 or 9x)
output to units * and 6. See Section 6.5.1 [Printing from FORTRAN], page 103, which describes
workarounds.
In the past most Fortran compilers implemented I/O on top of the C I/O system and so the
two interworked successfully. This was true of g77, but it is less true of gfortran as used in
gcc 4.y.z. In particular, any package that makes use of Fortran I/O will when compiled on
Windows interfere with C I/O: when the Fortran I/O is initialized (typically when the package
is loaded) the C stdout and stderr are switched to LF line endings. (Function La_Init in file
‘src/main/lapack.c’ shows how to mitigate this.) Even worse, prior to R 2.6.2 using Fortran
output when running under the Windows GUI console (Rgui) would hang the R session. This
is now avoided by ensuring that the Fortran output is written to a file (‘fort.6’ in the working
directory).

5.8 Linking to other packages
It is not in general possible to link a DLL in package packA to a DLL provided by package
packB (for the security reasons mentioned in Section 5.3 [dyn.load and dyn.unload], page 69,
and also because some platforms distinguish between shared and dynamic libraries), but it is on
Windows.
Note that there can be tricky versioning issues here, as package packB could be re-installed af-
ter package packA — it is desirable that the API provided by package packB remains backwards-
compatible.


5.8.1 Unix-alikes
It is possible to link a shared object in package packA to a library provided by package packB
under limited circumstances on a Unix-alike OS. There are severe portability issues, so this is
not recommended for a distributed package.
This is easiest if packB provides a static library ‘packB/libs/libpackB.a’. (This will need
to be compiled with PIC flags on platforms where it matters.) Then as the code from package
packB is incorporated when package packA is installed, we only need to find the static library
at install time for package packB. The only issue is to find package packB, and for that we can
ask R by something like
PKGB_PATH=‘echo ’library(packB); cat(system.file(libs, package=packB))’
| R --vanilla --slave‘
PKG_LIBS=$(PKGB_PATH)/libpackB.a
(If ‘libpackB.a’ itself depends on other libraries these will need to be included in PKG_LIBS.)
For a dynamic library ‘packB/libs/libpackB.so’ (‘packB/libs/libpackB.dylib’ on Mac
OS X) we could use
PKG_LIBS=-L$(PKGB_PATH) -lpackB
This will work for installation, but very likely not when package packB is loaded, as the path
to package packB’s ‘libs’ directory is not in the ld.so2 search path. You can arrange to put it
there before R is launched by setting (on some platforms) LD_RUN_PATH or LD_LIBRARY_PATH or
adding to the ld.so cache (see man ldconfig). On platforms that support it, the path to the
dynamic library can be hardcoded at install time (which assumes that the location of package
packB will not be changed). On systems with the GNU linker (e.g. Linux) and some others (e.g.
Mac OS X) this can be done by
PKG_LIBS=-L$(PKGB_PATH) -rpath $(PKGB_PATH) -lpackB
and on some other systems (e.g. Solaris with its native linker) use -R rather than -rpath.
It may be possible to figure out what is required semi-automatically from the result of R CMD
libtool --config (look for ‘hardcode’).
Making headers provided by package packB available to the code to be compiled in package
packA can be done by the LinkingTo mechanism (see Section 5.4 [Registering native routines],
page 70).

5.8.2 Windows
Suppose package packA wants to make use of compiled code provided by packB in DLL
‘packB/libs/exB.dll’, possibly the package’s DLL ‘packB/libs/packB.dll’. (This can be
extended to linking to more than one package in a similar way.) There are three issues to be
addressed:
• Making headers provided by package packB available to the code to be compiled in package
packA.
This is done by the LinkingTo mechanism (see Section 5.4 [Registering native routines],
page 70).
• preparing packA.dll to link to ‘packB/libs/exB.dll’.
This needs an entry in ‘Makevars.win’ of the form
2
dyld on Mac OS X, and DYLD_LIBRARY_PATHS below.


PKG_LIBS= -Lsomething -lexB
and one possibility is that something is the path to the installed ‘pkgB/libs’ directory.
To find that we need to ask R where it is by something like
| rterm --vanilla --slave‘
PKG_LIBS= -L$(PKGB_PATH) -lexB
Another possibility is to use an import library, shipping with package packA an exports file
‘exB.def’. Then ‘Makevars.win’ could contain
PKG_LIBS= -L. -lexB

all: $(SHLIB) before

before: libexB.dll.a
libexB.dll.a: exB.def
and then installing package packA will make and use the import library for ‘exB.dll’. (One
way to prepare the exports file is to use ‘pexports.exe’.)
• loading ‘packA.dll’ which depends on ‘exB.dll’.
If exB.dll was used by package packB (because it is in fact ‘packB.dll’ or ‘packB.dll’
depends on it) and packB has been loaded before packA, then nothing more needs to be
done as ‘exB.dll’ will already be loaded into the R executable. (This is the most common
scenario).
More generally, we can use the DLLpath argument to library.dynam to ensure that exB.dll
is found, for example by setting
library.dynam(packA, pkg, lib,
DLLpath = system.file(libs, package=packB))
Note that DLLpath can only set one path, and so for linking to two or more packages you
would need to resort to setting PATH.

5.9 Handling R objects in C
Using C code to speed up the execution of an R function is often very fruitful. Traditionally this
has been done via the .C function in R. One restriction of this interface is that the R objects
can not be handled directly in C. This becomes more troublesome when one wishes to call R
functions from within the C code. There is a C function provided called call_R (also known
as call_S for compatibility with S) that can do that, but it is cumbersome to use, and the
mechanisms documented here are usually simpler to use, as well as more powerful.
If a user really wants to write C code using internal R data structures, then that can be done
using the .Call and .External function. The syntax for the calling function in R in each case
is similar to that of .C, but the two functions have different C interfaces. Generally the .Call
interface (which is modelled on the interface of the same name in S version 4) is a little simpler
to use, but .External is a little more general.
A call to .Call is very similar to .C, for example
.Call(convolve2, a, b)
The first argument should be a character string giving a C symbol name of code that has already
been loaded into R. Up to 65 R objects can passed as arguments. The C side of the interface is
#include R.h

SEXP convolve2(SEXP a, SEXP b)
...


A call to .External is almost identical
.External(convolveE, a, b)
but the C side of the interface is different, having only one argument
#include R.h

SEXP convolveE(SEXP args)
...
Here args is a LISTSXP, a Lisp-style pairlist from which the arguments can be extracted.
In each case the R objects are available for manipulation via a set of functions and macros de-
fined in the header file ‘Rinternals.h’ or some S4-compatibility macros defined in ‘Rdefines.h’.
See Section 5.10 [Interface functions .Call and .External], page 87 for details on .Call and
.External.
Before you decide to use .Call or .External, you should look at other alternatives. First,
consider working in interpreted R code; if this is fast enough, this is normally the best option.
You should also see if using .C is enough. If the task to be performed in C is simple enough
requiring no call to R, .C suffices. The new interfaces are relatively recent additions to S and
R, and a great deal of useful code has been written using just .C before they were available.
The .Call and .External interfaces allow much more control, but they also impose much
greater responsibilities so need to be used with care. Neither .Call nor .External copy their
arguments. You should treat arguments you receive through these interfaces as read-only.
There are two approaches that can be taken to handling R objects from within C code. The
first (historically) is to use the macros and functions that have been used to implement the
core parts of R through .Internal calls. A public3 subset of these is defined in the header file
‘Rinternals.h’ in the directory ‘R_INCLUDE_DIR ’ (default ‘R_HOME /include’) that should be
available on any R installation.
Another approach is to use R versions of the macros and functions defined for the S version 4
interface .Call, which are defined in the header file ‘Rdefines.h’. This is a somewhat simpler
approach, and is to be preferred if the code is intended to be shared with S. However, it is less
well documented and even less tested. Note too that some idiomatic S4 constructions with these
macros (such as assigning elements of character vectors or lists) are invalid in R.
A substantial amount of R is implemented using the functions and macros described here, so
the R source code provides a rich source of examples and “how to do it”: indeed many of the
examples here were developed by examining closely R system functions for similar tasks. Do
make use of the source code for inspirational examples.
It is necessary to know something about how R objects are handled in C code. All the R
objects you will deal with will be handled with the type SEXP 4 , which is a pointer to a structure
with typedef SEXPREC. Think of this structure as a variant type that can handle all the usual
types of R objects, that is vectors of various modes, functions, environments, language objects
and so on. The details are given later in this section and in Section “R Internal Structures” in
R Internals, but for most purposes the programmer does not need to know them. Think rather
of a model such as that used by Visual Basic, in which R objects are handed around in C code
(as they are in interpreted R code) as the variant type, and the appropriate part is extracted
for, for example, numerical calculations, only when it is needed. As in interpreted R code, much
use is made of coercion to force the variant object to the right type.

3
see Chapter 6 [The R API], page 100: note that these are not all part of the API.
4
SEXP is an acronym for S imple EXP ression, common in LISP-like language syntaxes.


5.9.1 Handling the effects of garbage collection
We need to know a little about the way R handles memory allocation. The memory allocated for
R objects is not freed by the user; instead, the memory is from time to time garbage collected.
That is, some or all of the allocated memory not being used is freed.
The R object types are represented by a C structure defined by a typedef SEXPREC in
‘Rinternals.h’. It contains several things among which are pointers to data blocks and to
other SEXPRECs. A SEXP is simply a pointer to a SEXPREC.
If you create an R object in your C code, you must tell R that you are using the object by
using the PROTECT macro on a pointer to the object. This tells R that the object is in use so it
is not destroyed during garbage collection. Notice that it is the object which is protected, not
the pointer variable. It is a common mistake to believe that if you invoked PROTECT(p ) at some
point then p is protected from then on, but that is not true once a new object is assigned to p.
Protecting an R object automatically protects all the R objects pointed to in the correspond-
ing SEXPREC, for example all elements of a protected list are automatically protected.
The programmer is solely responsible for housekeeping the calls to PROTECT. There is a
corresponding macro UNPROTECT that takes as argument an int giving the number of objects
to unprotect when they are no longer needed. The protection mechanism is stack-based, so
UNPROTECT(n ) unprotects the last n objects which were protected. The calls to PROTECT and
UNPROTECT must balance when the user’s code returns. R will warn about stack imbalance
in .Call (or .External) if the housekeeping is wrong.
Here is a small example of creating an R numeric vector in C code. First we use the macros
in ‘Rinternals.h’:
#include R.h

SEXP ab;
....
PROTECT(ab = allocVector(REALSXP, 2));
REAL(ab)[0] = 123.45;
REAL(ab)[1] = 67.89;
UNPROTECT(1);
and then those in ‘Rdefines.h’:
#include R.h
#include Rdefines.h

SEXP ab;
....
PROTECT(ab = NEW_NUMERIC(2));
NUMERIC_POINTER(ab)[0] = 123.45;
NUMERIC_POINTER(ab)[1] = 67.89;
UNPROTECT(1);
Now, the reader may ask how the R object could possibly get removed during those manipu-
lations, as it is just our C code that is running. As it happens, we can do without the protection
in this example, but in general we do not know (nor want to know) what is hiding behind the
R macros and functions we use, and any of them might cause memory to be allocated, hence
garbage collection and hence our object ab to be removed. It is usually wise to err on the side
of caution and assume that any of the R macros and functions might remove the object.
In some cases it is necessary to keep better track of whether protection is really needed. Be
particularly aware of situations where a large number of objects are generated. The pointer


protection stack has a fixed size (default 10,000) and can become full. It is not a good idea
then to just PROTECT everything in sight and UNPROTECT several thousand objects at the end. It
will almost invariably be possible to either assign the objects as part of another object (which
automatically protects them) or unprotect them immediately after use.
Protection is not needed for objects which R already knows are in use. In particular, this
applies to function arguments.
There is a less-used macro UNPROTECT_PTR(s ) that unprotects the object pointed to by the
SEXP s, even if it is not the top item on the pointer protection stack. This is rarely needed
outside the parser (the R sources have one example, in ‘src/main/plot3d.c’).
Sometimes an object is changed (for example duplicated, coerced or grown) yet the current
value needs to be protected. For these cases PROTECT_WITH_INDEX saves an index of the pro-
tection location that can be used to replace the protected value using REPROTECT. For example
(from the internal code for optim)
PROTECT_INDEX ipx;

....
PROTECT_WITH_INDEX(s = eval(OS-R_fcall, OS-R_env), ipx);
REPROTECT(s = coerceVector(s, REALSXP), ipx);

5.9.2 Allocating storage
For many purposes it is sufficient to allocate R objects and manipulate those. There are quite
a few allocXxx functions defined in ‘Rinternals.h’—you may want to explore them. These
allocate R objects of various types, and for the standard vector types there are equivalent NEW_
XXX macros defined in ‘Rdefines.h’.
If storage is required for C objects during the calculations this is best allocating by calling
R_alloc; see Section 6.1 [Memory allocation], page 100. All of these memory allocation routines
do their own error-checking, so the programmer may assume that they will raise an error and
not return if the memory cannot be allocated.

5.9.3 Details of R types
Users of the ‘Rinternals.h’ macros will need to know how the R types are known internally:
if the ‘Rdefines.h’ macros are used then S4-compatible names are used.
The different R data types are represented in C by SEXPTYPE. Some of these are familiar
from R and some are internal data types. The usual R object modes are given in the table.

SEXPTYPE R equivalent
REALSXP numeric with storage mode double
INTSXP integer
CPLXSXP complex
LGLSXP logical
STRSXP character
VECSXP list (generic vector)
LISTSXP “dotted-pair” list
DOTSXP a ‘...’ object
NILSXP NULL
SYMSXP name/symbol
CLOSXP function or function closure
ENVSXP environment
Among the important internal SEXPTYPEs are LANGSXP, CHARSXP, PROMSXP, etc. (Note: although
it is possible to return objects of internal types, it is unsafe to do so as assumptions are made


about how they are handled which may be violated at user-level evaluation.) More details are
given in Section “R Internal Structures” in R Internals.

Unless you are very sure about the type of the arguments, the code should check the data
types. Sometimes it may also be necessary to check data types of objects created by evaluating
an R expression in the C code. You can use functions like isReal, isInteger and isString to
do type checking. See the header file ‘Rinternals.h’ for definitions of other such functions. All
of these take a SEXP as argument and return 1 or 0 to indicate TRUE or FALSE. Once again
there are two ways to do this, and ‘Rdefines.h’ has macros such as IS_NUMERIC.

What happens if the SEXP is not of the correct type? Sometimes you have no other option
except to generate an error. You can use the function error for this. It is usually better to
coerce the object to the correct type. For example, if you find that an SEXP is of the type
INTEGER, but you need a REAL object, you can change the type by using, equivalently,

PROTECT(newSexp = coerceVector(oldSexp, REALSXP));

or

PROTECT(newSexp = AS_NUMERIC(oldSexp ));

Protection is needed as a new object is created; the object formerly pointed to by the SEXP is
still protected but now unused.

All the coercion functions do their own error-checking, and generate NAs with a warning or
stop with an error as appropriate.

Note that these coercion functions are not the same as calling as.numeric (and so on) in R
code, as they do not dispatch on the class of the object. Thus it is normally preferable to do
the coercion in the calling R code.

So far we have only seen how to create and coerce R objects from C code, and how to extract
the numeric data from numeric R vectors. These can suffice to take us a long way in interfacing
R objects to numerical algorithms, but we may need to know a little more to create useful return
objects.

5.9.4 Attributes
Many R objects have attributes: some of the most useful are classes and the dim and dimnames
that mark objects as matrices or arrays. It can also be helpful to work with the names attribute
of vectors.

To illustrate this, let us write code to take the outer product of two vectors (which outer
and %o% already do). As usual the R code is simple

out - function(x, y)
{
storage.mode(x) - storage.mode(y) - double
.Call(out, x, y)
}

where we expect x and y to be numeric vectors (possibly integer), possibly with names. This
time we do the coercion in the calling R code.

C code to do the computations is


#include R.h

SEXP out(SEXP x, SEXP y)
{
int i, j, nx, ny;
double tmp, *rx = REAL(x), *ry = REAL(y), *rans;
SEXP ans;

nx = length(x); ny = length(y);
PROTECT(ans = allocMatrix(REALSXP, nx, ny));
rans = REAL(ans);
for(i = 0; i nx; i++) {
tmp = rx[i];
for(j = 0; j ny; j++)
rans[i + nx*j] = tmp * ry[j];
}
UNPROTECT(1);
return(ans);
}
Note the way REAL is used: as it is a function call it can be considerably faster to store the result
and index that.
However, we would like to set the dimnames of the result. Although allocMatrix provides
a short cut, we will show how to set the dim attribute directly.
#include R.h

SEXP out(SEXP x, SEXP y)
{
R_len_t i, j, nx, ny;
double tmp, *rx = REAL(x), *ry = REAL(y), *rans;
SEXP ans, dim, dimnames;

nx = length(x); ny = length(y);
PROTECT(ans = allocVector(REALSXP, nx*ny));
rans = REAL(ans);
for(i = 0; i nx; i++) {
tmp = rx[i];
for(j = 0; j ny; j++)
rans[i + nx*j] = tmp * ry[j];
}

PROTECT(dim = allocVector(INTSXP, 2));
INTEGER(dim)[0] = nx; INTEGER(dim)[1] = ny;
setAttrib(ans, R_DimSymbol, dim);

PROTECT(dimnames = allocVector(VECSXP, 2));
SET_VECTOR_ELT(dimnames, 0, getAttrib(x, R_NamesSymbol));
SET_VECTOR_ELT(dimnames, 1, getAttrib(y, R_NamesSymbol));
setAttrib(ans, R_DimNamesSymbol, dimnames);


UNPROTECT(3);
return(ans);
}
This example introduces several new features. The getAttrib and setAttrib functions get
and set individual attributes. Their second argument is a SEXP defining the name in the symbol
table of the attribute we want; these and many such symbols are defined in the header file
‘Rinternals.h’.
There are shortcuts here too: the functions namesgets, dimgets and dimnamesgets are the
internal versions of the default methods of names-, dim- and dimnames- (for vectors and
arrays), and there are functions such as GetMatrixDimnames and GetArrayDimnames.
What happens if we want to add an attribute that is not pre-defined? We need to add a
symbol for it via a call to install. Suppose for illustration we wanted to add an attribute
version with value 3.0. We could use
SEXP version;
PROTECT(version = allocVector(REALSXP, 1));
REAL(version)[0] = 3.0;
setAttrib(ans, install(version), version);
UNPROTECT(1);
Using install when it is not needed is harmless and provides a simple way to retrieve the
symbol from the symbol table if it is already installed.

5.9.5 Classes
In R the (S3) class is just the attribute named class so it can be handled as such, but there
is a shortcut classgets. Suppose we want to give the return value in our example the class
mat. We can use
#include R.h
#include Rdefines.h
....
SEXP ans, dim, dimnames, class;
....
PROTECT(class = allocVector(STRSXP, 1));
SET_STRING_ELT(class, 0, mkChar(mat));
classgets(ans, class);
UNPROTECT(4);
return(ans);
}
As the value is a character vector, we have to know how to create that from a C character array,
which we do using the function mkChar.

5.9.6 Handling lists
Some care is needed with lists, as R moved early on from using LISP-like lists (now called
“pairlists”) to S-like generic vectors. As a result, the appropriate test for an object of mode
list is isNewList, and we need allocVector(VECSXP, n ) and not allocList(n ).
List elements can be retrieved or set by direct access to the elements of the generic vector.
Suppose we have a list object
a - list(f=1, g=2, h=3)
Then we can access a$g as a[[2]] by
double g;
....
g = REAL(VECTOR_ELT(a, 1))[0];


This can rapidly become tedious, and the following function (based on one in package stats)
is very useful:

/* get the list element named str, or return NULL */

SEXP getListElement(SEXP list, const char *str)
{
SEXP elmt = R_NilValue, names = getAttrib(list, R_NamesSymbol);
int i;

for (i = 0; i length(list); i++)
if(strcmp(CHAR(STRING_ELT(names, i)), str) == 0) {
elmt = VECTOR_ELT(list, i);
break;
}
return elmt;
}

and enables us to say

double g;
g = REAL(getListElement(a, g))[0];

5.9.7 Handling character data
R character vectors are stored as STRSXPs, a vector type like VECSXP where every element is
of type CHARSXP. The CHARSXP elements of STRSXPs are accessed using STRING_ELT and SET_
STRING_ELT.

As of R 2.6.0, CHARSXPs are read-only objects and must never be modified. In particular,
the C-style string contained in a CHARSXP should be treated as read-only and for this reason the
CHAR function used to access the character data of a CHARSXP returns (const char *) (this also
allows compilers to issue warnings about improper use). Since CHARSXPs are immutable, the
same CHARSXP can be shared by any STRSXP needing an element representing the same string.
As of R 2.6.0, R maintains a global cache of CHARSXPs so that there is only ever one CHARSXP
representing a given string in memory.

You can obtain a CHARSXP by calling mkChar and providing a nul-terminated C-style string.
This function will return a pre-existing CHARSXP if one with a matching string already exists,
otherwise it will create a new one and add it to the cache before returning it to you. The variant
mkCharLen can be used to create a CHARSXP from part of a buffer and will ensure null-termination.

Currently, it is still possible to create CHARSXPs using allocVector; CHARSXPs created in this
way will not be captured by the global CHARSXP cache and this should be avoided. In the future,
all CHARSXPs will be captured by the cache and this will allow further optimizations, for example,
replacing calls to strcmp with pointer comparisons. A helper macro, CallocCharBuf, can be
used to obtain a temporary character buffer for in-place string manipulation: this memory must
be released using Free.

5.9.8 Finding and setting variables
It will be usual that all the R objects needed in our C computations are passed as arguments to
.Call or .External, but it is possible to find the values of R objects from within the C given
their names. The following code is the equivalent of get(name, envir = rho).


SEXP getvar(SEXP name, SEXP rho)
{
SEXP ans;

if(!isString(name) || length(name) != 1)
error(name is not a single string);
if(!isEnvironment(rho))
error(rho should be an environment);
ans = findVar(install(CHAR(STRING_ELT(name, 0))), rho);
Rprintf(first value is %fn, REAL(ans)[0]);
return(R_NilValue);
}
The main work is done by findVar, but to use it we need to install name as a name in the
symbol table. As we wanted the value for internal use, we return NULL.
Similar functions with syntax
void defineVar(SEXP symbol, SEXP value, SEXP rho)
void setVar(SEXP symbol, SEXP value, SEXP rho)
can be used to assign values to R variables. defineVar creates a new binding or changes the value
of an existing binding in the specified environment frame; it is the analogue of assign(symbol,
value, envir = rho, inherits = FALSE), but unlike assign, defineVar does not make a copy
of the object value.5 setVar searches for an existing binding for symbol in rho or its enclosing
environments. If a binding is found, its value is changed to value. Otherwise, a new binding with
the specified value is created in the global environment. This corresponds to assign(symbol,
value, envir = rho, inherits = TRUE).

5.9.9 Some convenience functions
Some operations are done so frequently that there are convenience functions to handle them.
Suppose we wanted to pass a single logical argument ignore_quotes: we could use
int ign;

ign = asLogical(ignore_quotes);
if(ign == NA_LOGICAL) error(’ignore_quotes’ must be TRUE or FALSE);
which will do any coercion needed (at least from a vector argument), and return NA_LOGICAL if
the value passed was NA or coercion failed. There are also asInteger, asReal and asComplex.
The function asChar returns a CHARSXP. All of these functions ignore any elements of an input
vector after the first.
To return a length-one real vector we can use
double x;

...
return ScalarReal(x);
and there are versions of this for all the atomic vector types (those for a length-one character
vector being ScalarString with argument a CHARSXP and mkString with argument const char
*).
Some of the isXXXX functions differ from their apparent R-level counterparts: for example
isVector is true for any atomic vector type (isVectorAtomic) and for lists and expressions
(isVectorList) (with no check on attributes). isMatrix is a test of a length-2 dim attribute.
5
You can assign a copy of the object in the environment frame rho using defineVar(symbol,
duplicate(value), rho)).


There are a series of small macros/functions to help construct pairlists and language objects
(whose internal structures just differ by SEXPTYPE. Function CONS(u, v) is the basic building
block: is constructs a pairlist from u followed by v (which is a pairlist or R_NilValue). LCONS is
a variant that constructs a language object. Functions list1 to list4 construct a pairlist from
one to four items, and lang1 to lang4 do the same for a language object (a function to call plus
zero to three arguments). Function elt and lastElt find the ith element and the last element
of a pairlist, and nthcdr returns a pointer to the nth position in the pairlist (whose CAR is the
nth item).
Functions str2type and type2str map R length-one character strings to and from SEXPTYPE
numbers, and type2char maps numbers to C character strings.

5.9.10 Named objects and copying
When assignments are done in R such as
x - 1:10
y - x
the named object is not necessarily copied, so after those two assignments y and x are bound to
the same SEXPREC (the structure a SEXP points to). This means that any code which alters one of
them has to make a copy before modifying the copy if the usual R semantics are to apply. Note
that whereas .C and .Fortran do copy their arguments (unless the dangerous dup = FALSE is
used), .Call and .External do not. So duplicate is commonly called on arguments to .Call
before modifying them.
However, at least some of this copying is unneeded. In the first assignment shown, x - 1:10,
R first creates an object with value 1:10 and then assigns it to x but if x is modified no copy is
necessary as the temporary object with value 1:10 cannot be referred to again. R distinguishes
between named and unnamed objects via a field in a SEXPREC that can be accessed via the
macros NAMED and SET_NAMED. This can take values
0 The object is not bound to any symbol
1 The object has been bound to exactly one symbol
2 The object has potentially been bound to two or more symbols, and one should act
as if another variable is currently bound to this value.
Note the past tenses: R does not do full reference counting and there may currently be fewer
bindings.
It is safe to modify the value of any SEXP for which NAMED(foo) is zero, and if NAMED(foo) is
two, the value should be duplicated (via a call to duplicate) before any modification. Note that
it is the responsibility of the author of the code making the modification to do the duplication,
even if it is x whose value is being modified after y - x.
The case NAMED(foo) == 1 allows some optimization, but it can be ignored (and duplication
done whenever NAMED(foo) 0). (This optimization is not currently usable in user code.) It is
intended for use within assignment functions. Suppose we used
x - 1:10
foo(x) - 3
which is computed as
x - 1:10
x - foo-(x, 3)
Then inside foo- the object pointing to the current value of x will have NAMED(foo) as one,
and it would be safe to modify it as the only symbol bound to it is x and that will be rebound
immediately. (Provided the remaining code in foo- make no reference to x, and no one is
going to attempt a direct call such as y - foo-(x).)


Currently all arguments to a .Call call will have NAMED set to 2, and so users must assume
that they need to be duplicated before alteration.

5.10 Interface functions .Call and .External
In this section we consider the details of the R/C interfaces.

These two interfaces have almost the same functionality. .Call is based on the interface
of the same name in S version 4, and .External is based on .Internal. .External is more
complex but allows a variable number of arguments.

5.10.1 Calling .Call
Let us convert our finite convolution example to use .Call, first using the ‘Rdefines.h’ macros.
The calling function in R is

conv - function(a, b) .Call(convolve2, a, b)

which could hardly be simpler, but as we shall see all the type checking must be transferred to
the C code, which is

#include R.h
#include Rdefines.h

{
int i, j, na, nb, nab;
double *xa, *xb, *xab;
SEXP ab;

PROTECT(a = AS_NUMERIC(a));
PROTECT(b = AS_NUMERIC(b));
na = LENGTH(a); nb = LENGTH(b); nab = na + nb - 1;
PROTECT(ab = NEW_NUMERIC(nab));
xa = NUMERIC_POINTER(a); xb = NUMERIC_POINTER(b);
xab = NUMERIC_POINTER(ab);
for(i = 0; i nab; i++) xab[i] = 0.0;
for(i = 0; i na; i++)
for(j = 0; j nb; j++) xab[i + j] += xa[i] * xb[j];
UNPROTECT(3);
return(ab);
}

Note that unlike the macros in S version 4, the R versions of these macros do check that
coercion can be done and raise an error if it fails. They will raise warnings if missing values are
introduced by coercion. Although we illustrate doing the coercion in the C code here, it often
is simpler to do the necessary coercions in the R code.

Now for the version in R-internal style. Only the C code changes.


#include R.h

{
R_len_t i, j, na, nb, nab;
SEXP ab;

PROTECT(a = coerceVector(a, REALSXP));
PROTECT(b = coerceVector(b, REALSXP));
na = length(a); nb = length(b); nab = na + nb - 1;
PROTECT(ab = allocVector(REALSXP, nab));
xa = REAL(a); xb = REAL(b);
xab = REAL(ab);
for(i = 0; i nab; i++) xab[i] = 0.0;
for(i = 0; i na; i++)
for(j = 0; j nb; j++) xab[i + j] += xa[i] * xb[j];
UNPROTECT(3);
return(ab);
}
This is called in exactly the same way.

5.10.2 Calling .External
We can use the same example to illustrate .External. The R code changes only by replacing
.Call by .External
conv - function(a, b) .External(convolveE, a, b)
but the main change is how the arguments are passed to the C code, this time as a single SEXP.
The only change to the C code is how we handle the arguments.
#include R.h

SEXP convolveE(SEXP args)
{
int i, j, na, nb, nab;
SEXP a, b, ab;

PROTECT(a = coerceVector(CADR(args), REALSXP));
PROTECT(b = coerceVector(CADDR(args), REALSXP));
...
}
Once again we do not need to protect the arguments, as in the R side of the interface they are
objects that are already in use. The macros
first = CADR(args);
second = CADDR(args);
third = CADDDR(args);
fourth = CAD4R(args);
provide convenient ways to access the first four arguments. More generally we can use the CDR
and CAR macros as in


args = CDR(args); a = CAR(args);
args = CDR(args); b = CAR(args);
which clearly allows us to extract an unlimited number of arguments (whereas .Call has a limit,
albeit at 65 not a small one).
More usefully, the .External interface provides an easy way to handle calls with a variable
number of arguments, as length(args) will give the number of arguments supplied (of which
the first is ignored). We may need to know the names (‘tags’) given to the actual arguments,
which we can by using the TAG macro and using something like the following example, that
prints the names and the first value of its arguments if they are vector types.
#include R_ext/PrtUtil.h

SEXP showArgs(SEXP args)
{
int i, nargs;
Rcomplex cpl;
const char *name;
SEXP el;

args = CDR(args); /* skip ’name’ */
for(i = 0; args != R_NilValue; i++, args = CDR(args)) {
args = CDR(args);
name = CHAR(PRINTNAME(TAG(args)));
switch(TYPEOF(CAR(args))) {
case REALSXP:
Rprintf([%d] ’%s’ %fn, i+1, name, REAL(CAR(args))[0]);
break;
case LGLSXP:
case INTSXP:
Rprintf([%d] ’%s’ %dn, i+1, name, INTEGER(CAR(args))[0]);
break;
case CPLXSXP:
cpl = COMPLEX(CAR(args))[0];
Rprintf([%d] ’%s’ %f + %fin, i+1, name, cpl.r, cpl.i);
break;
case STRSXP:
Rprintf([%d] ’%s’ %sn, i+1, name,
CHAR(STRING_ELT(CAR(args), 0)));
break;
default:
Rprintf([%d] ’%s’ R typen, i+1, name);
}
}
return(R_NilValue);
}
This can be called by the wrapper function
showArgs - function(...) .External(showArgs, ...)
Note that this style of programming is convenient but not necessary, as an alternative style is
showArgs1 - function(...) .Call(showArgs1, list(...))
The (very similar) C code is in the scripts.


5.10.3 Missing and special values
One piece of error-checking the .C call does (unless NAOK is true) is to check for missing (NA)
and IEEE special values (Inf, -Inf and NaN) and give an error if any are found. With the .Call
interface these will be passed to our code. In this example the special values are no problem, as
IEEE arithmetic will handle them correctly. In the current implementation this is also true of
NA as it is a type of NaN, but it is unwise to rely on such details. Thus we will re-write the code
to handle NAs using macros defined in ‘R_exts/Arith.h’ included by ‘R.h’.

The code changes are the same in any of the versions of convolve2 or convolveE:

...
for(i = 0; i na; i++)
for(j = 0; j nb; j++)
if(ISNA(xa[i]) || ISNA(xb[j]) || ISNA(xab[i + j]))
xab[i + j] = NA_REAL;
else
xab[i + j] += xa[i] * xb[j];
...

Note that the ISNA macro, and the similar macros ISNAN (which checks for NaN or NA) and
R_FINITE (which is false for NA and all the special values), only apply to numeric values of type
double. Missingness of integers, logicals and character strings can be tested by equality to the
constants NA_INTEGER, NA_LOGICAL and NA_STRING. These and NA_REAL can be used to set
elements of R vectors to NA.

The constants R_NaN, R_PosInf, R_NegInf and R_NaReal can be used to set doubles to the
special values.

5.11 Evaluating R expressions from C
We noted that the call_R interface could be used to evaluate R expressions from C code, but
the current interfaces are much more convenient to use. The main function we will use is

SEXP eval(SEXP expr, SEXP rho);

the equivalent of the interpreted R code eval(expr, envir = rho), although we can also make
use of findVar, defineVar and findFun (which restricts the search to functions).

To see how this might be applied, here is a simplified internal version of lapply for expres-
sions, used as

a - list(a = 1:5, b = rnorm(10), test = runif(100))
.Call(lapply, a, quote(sum(x)), new.env())

with C code


SEXP lapply(SEXP list, SEXP expr, SEXP rho)
{
R_len_t i, n = length(list);
SEXP ans;

if(!isNewList(list)) error(’list’ must be a list);
if(!isEnvironment(rho)) error(’rho’ should be an environment);
PROTECT(ans = allocVector(VECSXP, n));
for(i = 0; i n; i++) {
defineVar(install(x), VECTOR_ELT(list, i), rho);
SET_VECTOR_ELT(ans, i, eval(expr, rho));
}
setAttrib(ans, R_NamesSymbol, getAttrib(list, R_NamesSymbol));
UNPROTECT(1);
return(ans);
}
It would be closer to lapply if we could pass in a function rather than an expression. One
way to do this is via interpreted R code as in the next example, but it is possible (if somewhat
obscure) to do this in C code. The following is based on the code in ‘src/main/optimize.c’.
SEXP lapply2(SEXP list, SEXP fn, SEXP rho)
{
R_len_t i, n = length(list);
SEXP R_fcall, ans;

if(!isNewList(list)) error(’list’ must be a list);
if(!isFunction(fn)) error(’fn’ must be a function);
if(!isEnvironment(rho)) error(’rho’ should be an environment);
PROTECT(R_fcall = lang2(fn, R_NilValue));
PROTECT(ans = allocVector(VECSXP, n));
for(i = 0; i n; i++) {
SETCADR(R_fcall, VECTOR_ELT(list, i));
SET_VECTOR_ELT(ans, i, eval(R_fcall, rho));
}
setAttrib(ans, R_NamesSymbol, getAttrib(list, R_NamesSymbol));
UNPROTECT(2);
return(ans);
}
used by
.Call(lapply2, a, sum, new.env())
Function lang2 creates an executable pairlist of two elements, but this will only be clear to
those with a knowledge of a LISP-like language.
As a more comprehensive example of constructing an R call in C code and evaluating, consider
the following fragment of printAttributes in ‘src/main/print.c’.
/* Need to construct a call to
print(CAR(a), digits=digits)
based on the R_print structure, then eval(call, env).
See do_docall for the template for this sort of thing.
*/
SEXP s, t;
PROTECT(t = s = allocList(3));


SET_TYPEOF(s, LANGSXP);
SETCAR(t, install(print)); t = CDR(t);
SETCAR(t, CAR(a)); t = CDR(t);
SETCAR(t, ScalarInteger(digits));
SET_TAG(t, install(digits));
eval(s, env);
UNPROTECT(1);

At this point CAR(a) is the R object to be printed, the current attribute. There are three steps:
the call is constructed as a pairlist of length 3, the list is filled in, and the expression represented
by the pairlist is evaluated.

A pairlist is quite distinct from a generic vector list, the only user-visible form of list in R. A
pairlist is a linked list (with CDR(t) computing the next entry), with items (accessed by CAR(t))
and names or tags (set by SET_TAG). In this call there are to be three items, a symbol (pointing
to the function to be called) and two argument values, the first unnamed and the second named.
Setting the type to LANGSXP makes this a call which can be evaluated.

5.11.1 Zero-finding
In this section we re-work the example of call_S in Becker, Chambers Wilks (1988) on finding
a zero of a univariate function, The R code and an example are

zero - function(f, guesses, tol = 1e-7) {
f.check - function(x) {
x - f(x)
if(!is.numeric(x)) stop(Need a numeric result)
as.double(x)
}
.Call(zero, body(f.check), as.double(guesses), as.double(tol),
new.env())
}

cube1 - function(x) (x^2 + 1) * (x - 1.5)
zero(cube1, c(0, 5))

where this time we do the coercion and error-checking in the R code. The C code is

SEXP mkans(double x)
{
SEXP ans;
PROTECT(ans = allocVector(REALSXP, 1));
REAL(ans)[0] = x;
UNPROTECT(1);
return ans;
}

double feval(double x, SEXP f, SEXP rho)
{
defineVar(install(x), mkans(x), rho);
return(REAL(eval(f, rho))[0]);
}


SEXP zero(SEXP f, SEXP guesses, SEXP stol, SEXP rho)
{
double x0 = REAL(guesses)[0], x1 = REAL(guesses)[1],
tol = REAL(stol)[0];
double f0, f1, fc, xc;

if(tol = 0.0) error(non-positive tol value);
f0 = feval(x0, f, rho); f1 = feval(x1, f, rho);
if(f0 == 0.0) return mkans(x0);
if(f1 == 0.0) return mkans(x1);
if(f0*f1 0.0) error(x[0] and x[1] have the same sign);

for(;;) {
xc = 0.5*(x0+x1);
if(fabs(x0-x1) tol) return mkans(xc);
fc = feval(xc, f, rho);
if(fc == 0) return mkans(xc);
if(f0*fc 0.0) {
x0 = xc; f0 = fc;
} else {
x1 = xc; f1 = fc;
}
}
}
The C code is essentially unchanged from the call_R version, just using a couple of functions
to convert from double to SEXP and to evaluate f.check.

5.11.2 Calculating numerical derivatives
We will use a longer example (by Saikat DebRoy) to illustrate the use of evaluation and
.External. This calculates numerical derivatives, something that could be done as effectively
in interpreted R code but may be needed as part of a larger C calculation.
An interpreted R version and an example are
numeric.deriv - function(expr, theta, rho=sys.frame(sys.parent()))
{
eps - sqrt(.Machine$double.eps)
ans - eval(substitute(expr), rho)
grad - matrix(,length(ans), length(theta),
dimnames=list(NULL, theta))
for (i in seq_along(theta)) {
old - get(theta[i], envir=rho)
delta - eps * min(1, abs(old))
assign(theta[i], old+delta, envir=rho)
ans1 - eval(substitute(expr), rho)
assign(theta[i], old, envir=rho)
grad[, i] - (ans1 - ans)/delta
}
attr(ans, gradient) - grad
ans
}
omega - 1:5; x - 1; y - 2
numeric.deriv(sin(omega*x*y), c(x, y))


where expr is an expression, theta a character vector of variable names and rho the environment
to be used.
For the compiled version the call from R will be
.External(numeric_deriv, expr, theta, rho )
with example usage
.External(numeric_deriv, quote(sin(omega*x*y)),
c(x, y), .GlobalEnv)
Note the need to quote the expression to stop it being evaluated.
Here is the complete C code which we will explain section by section.
#include R.h /* for DOUBLE_EPS */

SEXP numeric_deriv(SEXP args)
{
SEXP theta, expr, rho, ans, ans1, gradient, par, dimnames;
double tt, xx, delta, eps = sqrt(DOUBLE_EPS), *rgr, *rans;
int start, i, j;

expr = CADR(args);
if(!isString(theta = CADDR(args)))
error(theta should be of type character);
if(!isEnvironment(rho = CADDDR(args)))

PROTECT(ans = coerceVector(eval(expr, rho), REALSXP));
PROTECT(gradient = allocMatrix(REALSXP, LENGTH(ans), LENGTH(theta)));
rgr = REAL(gradient); rans = REAL(ans);

for(i = 0, start = 0; i LENGTH(theta); i++, start += LENGTH(ans)) {
PROTECT(par = findVar(install(CHAR(STRING_ELT(theta, i))), rho));
tt = REAL(par)[0];
xx = fabs(tt);
delta = (xx 1) ? eps : xx*eps;
REAL(par)[0] += delta;
PROTECT(ans1 = coerceVector(eval(expr, rho), REALSXP));
for(j = 0; j LENGTH(ans); j++)
rgr[j + start] = (REAL(ans1)[j] - rans[j])/delta;
REAL(par)[0] = tt;
UNPROTECT(2); /* par, ans1 */
}

SET_VECTOR_ELT(dimnames, 1, theta);
dimnamesgets(gradient, dimnames);
setAttrib(ans, install(gradient), gradient);
UNPROTECT(3); /* ans gradient dimnames */
return ans;
}
The code to handle the arguments is


expr = CADR(args);
if(!isString(theta = CADDR(args)))
error(theta should be of type character);
if(!isEnvironment(rho = CADDDR(args)))
Note that we check for correct types of theta and rho but do not check the type of expr. That
is because eval can handle many types of R objects other than EXPRSXP. There is no useful
coercion we can do, so we stop with an error message if the arguments are not of the correct
mode.
The first step in the code is to evaluate the expression in the environment rho, by
PROTECT(ans = coerceVector(eval(expr, rho), REALSXP));
We then allocate space for the calculated derivative by
PROTECT(gradient = allocMatrix(REALSXP, LENGTH(ans), LENGTH(theta)));
The first argument to allocMatrix gives the SEXPTYPE of the matrix: here we want it to be
REALSXP. The other two arguments are the numbers of rows and columns.
for(i = 0, start = 0; i LENGTH(theta); i++, start += LENGTH(ans)) {
PROTECT(par = findVar(install(CHAR(STRING_ELT(theta, i))), rho));
Here, we are entering a for loop. We loop through each of the variables. In the for loop, we
first create a symbol corresponding to the i’th element of the STRSXP theta. Here, STRING_
ELT(theta, i) accesses the i’th element of the STRSXP theta. Macro CHAR() extracts the
actual character representation6 of it: it returns a pointer. We then install the name and use
findVar to find its value.
tt = REAL(par)[0];
xx = fabs(tt);
delta = (xx 1) ? eps : xx*eps;
REAL(par)[0] += delta;
PROTECT(ans1 = coerceVector(eval(expr, rho), REALSXP));
We first extract the real value of the parameter, then calculate delta, the increment to be
used for approximating the numerical derivative. Then we change the value stored in par (in
environment rho) by delta and evaluate expr in environment rho again. Because we are directly
dealing with original R memory locations here, R does the evaluation for the changed parameter
value.
for(j = 0; j LENGTH(ans); j++)
rgr[j + start] = (REAL(ans1)[j] - rans[j])/delta;
REAL(par)[0] = tt;
UNPROTECT(2);
}
Now, we compute the i’th column of the gradient matrix. Note how it is accessed: R stores
matrices by column (like FORTRAN).
SET_VECTOR_ELT(dimnames, 1, theta);
dimnamesgets(gradient, dimnames);
setAttrib(ans, install(gradient), gradient);
UNPROTECT(3);
return ans;
}
6
see Section 5.15 [Character encoding issues], page 99 for why this might not be what is required.


First we add column names to the gradient matrix. This is done by allocating a list (a VECSXP)
whose first element, the row names, is NULL (the default) and the second element, the col-
umn names, is set as theta. This list is then assigned as the attribute having the symbol
R_DimNamesSymbol. Finally we set the gradient matrix as the gradient attribute of ans, unpro-
tect the remaining protected locations and return the answer ans.

5.12 Parsing R code from C
Suppose an R extension want to accept an R expression from the user and evaluate it. The
previous section covered evaluation, but the expression will be entered as text and needs to be
parsed first. A small part of R’s parse interface is declared in header file ‘R_ext/Parse.h’7 .
An example of the usage can be found in the (example) Windows package windlgs included
in the R source tree. The essential part is
#include R.h
#include R_ext/Parse.h

SEXP menu_ttest3()
{
char cmd[256];
SEXP cmdSexp, cmdexpr, ans = R_NilValue;
int i;
ParseStatus status;
...
if(done == 1) {
PROTECT(cmdSexp = allocVector(STRSXP, 1));
SET_STRING_ELT(cmdSexp, 0, mkChar(cmd));
cmdexpr = PROTECT(R_ParseVector(cmdSexp, -1, status, R_NilValue));
if (status != PARSE_OK) {
UNPROTECT(2);
error(invalid call %s, cmd);
}
/* Loop is needed here as EXPSEXP will be of length 1 */
for(i = 0; i length(cmdexpr); i++)
ans = eval(VECTOR_ELT(cmdexpr, i), R_GlobalEnv);
UNPROTECT(2);
}
return ans;
}
Note that a single line of text may give rise to more than one R expression.
R_ParseVector is essentially the code used to implement parse(text=) at R level. The first
argument is a character vector (corresponding to text) and the second the maximal number
of expressions to parse (corresponding to n). The third argument is a pointer to a variable of
an enumeration type, and it is normal (as parse does) to regard all values other than PARSE_
OK as an error. Other values which might be returned are PARSE_INCOMPLETE (an incomplete
expression was found) and PARSE_ERROR (a syntax error), in both cases the value returned being
R_NilValue. The fourth argument is a srcfile object or the R NULL object (as in the example
above). In the former case a srcref attribute would be attached to the result, containing a list
of srcref objects of the same length as the expression, to allow it to be echoed with its original
formatting.
7
This is only guaranteed to show the current interface: it is liable to change.


5.13 External pointers and weak references
The SEXPTYPEs EXTPTRSXP and WEAKREFSXP can be encountered at R level, but are created in
C code.
External pointer SEXPs are intended to handle references to C structures such as ‘handles’,
and are used for this purpose in package RODBC for example. They are unusual in their copying
semantics in that when an R object is copied, the external pointer object is not duplicated. (For
this reason external pointers should only be used as part of an object with normal semantics,
for example an attribute or an element of a list.)
An external pointer is created by
SEXP R_MakeExternalPtr(void *p, SEXP tag, SEXP prot);
where p is the pointer (and hence this cannot portably be a function pointer), and tag and prot
are references to ordinary R objects which will remain in existence (be protected from garbage
collection) for the lifetime of the external pointer object. A useful convention is to use the tag
field for some form of type identification and the prot field for protecting the memory that the
external pointer represents, if that memory is allocated from the R heap. Both tag and prot
can be R_NilValue, and often are.
The elements of an external pointer can be accessed and set via
void *R_ExternalPtrAddr(SEXP s);
SEXP R_ExternalPtrTag(SEXP s);
SEXP R_ExternalPtrProtected(SEXP s);
void R_ClearExternalPtr(SEXP s);
void R_SetExternalPtrAddr(SEXP s, void *p);
void R_SetExternalPtrTag(SEXP s, SEXP tag);
void R_SetExternalPtrProtected(SEXP s, SEXP p);
Clearing a pointer sets its value to the C NULL pointer.
An external pointer object can have a finalizer, a piece of code to be run when the object is
garbage collected. This can be R code or C code, and the various interfaces are, respectively.
void R_RegisterFinalizerEx(SEXP s, SEXP fun, Rboolean onexit);

typedef void (*R_CFinalizer_t)(SEXP);
void R_RegisterCFinalizerEx(SEXP s, R_CFinalizer_t fun, Rboolean onexit);
The R function indicated by fun should be a function of a single argument, the object to be
finalized. R does not perform a garbage collection when shutting down, and the onexit argument
of the extended forms can be used to ask that the finalizer be run during a normal shutdown of
the R session. It is suggested that it is good practice to clear the pointer on finalization.
The only R level function for interacting with external pointers is reg.finalizer which can
be used to set a finalizer.
It is probably not a good idea to allow an external pointer to be saved and then reloaded,
but if this happens the pointer will be set to the C NULL pointer.
Weak references are used to allow the programmer to maintain information on entities without
preventing the garbage collection of the entities once they become unreachable.
A weak reference contains a key and a value. The value is reachable is if it either reachable
directly or via weak references with reachable keys. Once a value is determined to be unreachable
during garbage collection, the key and value are set to R_NilValue and the finalizer will be run
later in the garbage collection.
Weak reference objects are created by one of
SEXP R_MakeWeakRef(SEXP key, SEXP val, SEXP fin, Rboolean onexit);
SEXP R_MakeWeakRefC(SEXP key, SEXP val, R_CFinalizer_t fin,


Rboolean onexit);
where the R or C finalizer are specified in exactly the same way as for an external pointer object
(whose finalization interface is implemented via weak references).
The parts can be accessed via
SEXP R_WeakRefKey(SEXP w);
SEXP R_WeakRefValue(SEXP w);
void R_RunWeakRefFinalizer(SEXP w);
A toy example of the use of weak references can be found at www.stat.uiowa.edu/~luke/
R/references/weakfinex.html, but that is used to add finalizers to external pointers which
can now be done more directly. At the time of writing no CRAN or Bioconductor package uses
weak references.

5.13.1 An example
Package RODBC uses external pointers to maintain its channels, connections to databases.
There can be several connections open at once, and the status information for each is stored in
a C structure (pointed to by this_handle) in the code extract below) that is returned via an
external pointer as part of the RODBC ‘channel’ (as the handle_ptr attribute). The external
pointer is created by
SEXP ans, ptr;
PROTECT(ans = allocVector(INTSXP, 1));
ptr = R_MakeExternalPtr(thisHandle, install(RODBC_channel), R_NilValue);
PROTECT(ptr);
R_RegisterCFinalizerEx(ptr, chanFinalizer, TRUE);
...
/* return the channel no */
INTEGER(ans)[0] = nChannels;
/* and the connection string as an attribute */
setAttrib(ans, install(connection.string), constr);
setAttrib(ans, install(handle_ptr), ptr);
UNPROTECT(3);
return ans;
Note the symbol given to identify the usage of the external pointer, and the use of the finalizer.
Since the final argument when registering the finalizer is TRUE, the finalizer will be run at the
the of the R session (unless it crashes). This is used to close and clean up the connection to the
database. The finalizer code is simply
static void chanFinalizer(SEXP ptr)
{
if(!R_ExternalPtrAddr(ptr)) return;
inRODBCClose(R_ExternalPtrAddr(ptr));
R_ClearExternalPtr(ptr); /* not really needed */
}
Clearing the pointer and checking for a NULL pointer avoids any possibility of attempting to
close an already-closed channel.
R’s connections provide another example of using external pointers, in that case purely to
be able to use a finalizer to close and destroy the connection if it is no longer is use.

5.14 Vector accessor functions
The vector accessors like REAL and INTEGER and VECTOR_ELT are functions when used in R
extensions. (For efficiency they are macros when used in the R source code, apart from SET_
STRING_ELT and SET_VECTOR_ELT which are always functions.)


The accessor functions check that they are being used on an appropriate type of SEXP.
If efficiency is essential, the macro versions of the accessors can be obtained by defining
‘USE_RINTERNALS’ before including ‘Rinternals.h’. If you find it necessary to do so, please do
test that your code compiled without ‘USE_RINTERNALS’ defined, as this provides a stricter test
that the accessors have been used correctly.

5.15 Character encoding issues
As from R 2.5.0 CHARSXPs can be marked as coming from a known encoding (Latin-1 or UTF-
8). This is mainly intended for human-readable output, and most packages can just treat such
CHARSXPs as a whole. However, if they need to be interpreted as characters or output at C
level then it would normally be correct to ensure that they are converted to the encoding of the
current locale: this can be done by accessing the data in the CHARSXP by translateChar rather
than by CHAR. If re-encoding is needed this allocates memory with R_alloc which thus persists
to the end of the .Call/.External call unless vmaxset is used.
As from R 2.7.0 there is a similar function translateCharUTF8 which converts to UTF-8:
this has the advantage that a faithful translation is almost always possible (whereas only a few
languages can be represented in the encoding of the current locale unless that is UTF-8).
As from R 2.7.0 there is a public interface to the encoding marked on CHARXSXPs via
typedef enum {CE_NATIVE, CE_UTF8, CE_LATIN1, CE_SYMBOL, CE_ANY} cetype_t;
cetype_t getCharCE(SEXP);
SEXP mkCharCE(const char *, cetype_t);
Only the CE_UTF8 and CE_LATIN1 are marked on CHARSXPs (and so Rf_getCharCE will only
return one of the first three), and these should only be used on non-ASCII strings. Value CE_
SYMBOL is used internally to indicate Adobe Symbol encoding. Value CE_ANY is used to indicate
a character string that will not need re-encoding – this is used for character strings known to
be in ASCII, and can also be used as an input parameter where the intention is that the string
is treated as a series of bytes.
Function
const char *reEnc(const char *x, cetype_t ce_in, cetype_t ce_out,
int subst);
can be used to re-encode character strings: like translateChar it returns a string allocated by
R_alloc. This can translate from CE_SYMBOL to CE_UTF8, but not conversely. Argument subst
controls what to do with untranslatable characters or invalid input: this is done byte-by-byte
with 1 indicates to output hex of the form a0, and 2 to replace by ., with any other value
causing the byte to produce no output.
R 2.8.0 added
SEXP mkCharLenCE(const char *, int, cetype_t);
to create marked character strings of a given length.

Chapter 6: The R API: entry points for C code 100

6 The R API: entry points for C code
There are a large number of entry points in the R executable/DLL that can be called from C
code (and some that can be called from FORTRAN code). Only those documented here are
stable enough that they will only be changed with considerable notice.
The recommended procedure to use these is to include the header file ‘R.h’ in your C code
by
#include R.h
This will include several other header files from the directory ‘R_INCLUDE_DIR /R_ext’, and there
are other header files there that can be included too, but many of the features they contain should
be regarded as undocumented and unstable.
An alternative is to include the header file ‘S.h’, which may be useful when porting code
from S. This includes rather less than ‘R.h’, and has extra some compatibility definitions (for
example the S_complex type from S).
The defines used for compatibility with S sometimes causes conflicts (notably with Windows
headers), and the known problematic defines can be removed by defining STRICT_R_HEADERS.
Most of these header files, including all those included by ‘R.h’, can be used from C++
code. Some others need to be included within an extern C declaration, and for clarity this is
advisable for all R header files.
Note: Because R re-maps many of its external names to avoid clashes with user
code, it is essential to include the appropriate header files when using these entry
points.
This remapping can cause problems1 , and can be eliminated by defining R_NO_REMAP and
prepending ‘Rf_’ to all the function names used from ‘Rinternals.h’ and ‘R_ext/Error.h’.
We can classify the entry points as
API Entry points which are documented in this manual and declared in an installed
header file. These can be used in distributed packages and will only be changed
after deprecation.
public Entry points declared in an installed header file that are exported on all R platforms
but are not documented and subject to change without notice.
private Entry points that are used when building R and exported on all R platforms but
are not declared in the installed header files. Do not use these in distributed code.
hidden Entry points that are where possible (Windows and some modern Unix compil-
ers/loaders when using R as a shared library) not exported.

6.1 Memory allocation
There are two types of memory allocation available to the C programmer, one in which R
manages the clean-up and the other in which user has full control (and responsibility).

6.1.1 Transient storage allocation
Here R will reclaim the memory at the end of the call to .C. Use
char *R_alloc(size_t n, int size )
which allocates n units of size bytes each. A typical usage (from package stats) is

1
Known problems are redefining error, length, vector and warning


x = (int *) R_alloc(nrows(merge)+2, sizeof(int));
(size_t is defined in ‘stddef.h’ which the header defining R_alloc includes.)
There is a similar call, S_alloc (for compatibility with older versions of S) which zeroes the
memory allocated,
char *S_alloc(long n, int size )
and
char *S_realloc(char *p, long new, long old, int size )
which changes the allocation size from old to new units, and zeroes the additional units.
For compatibility with current versions of S, header ‘S.h’ (only) defines wrapper macros
equivalent to
type* Salloc(long n, int type )
type* Srealloc(char *p, long new, long old, int type )
This memory is taken from the heap, and released at the end of the .C, .Call or .External
call. Users can also manage it, by noting the current position with a call to vmaxget and clearing
memory allocated subsequently by a call to vmaxset. This is only recommended for experts.
Note that this memory will be freed on error or user interrupt (if allowed: see Section 6.12
[Allowing interrupts], page 112).
Note that although n is long, there are limits imposed by R’s internal allocation mechanism.
These will only come into play on 64-bit systems, where the current limit for n is just under
16Gb.

6.1.2 User-controlled memory
The other form of memory allocation is an interface to malloc, the interface providing R error
handling. This memory lasts until freed by the user and is additional to the memory allocated
for the R workspace.
The interface functions are
type * Calloc(size_t n, type )
type * Realloc(any *p, size_t n, type )
void Free(any *p )
providing analogues of calloc, realloc and free. If there is an error during allocation it is
handled by R, so if these routines return the memory has been successfully allocated or freed.
Free will set the pointer p to NULL. (Some but not all versions of S do so.)
Users should arrange to Free this memory when no longer needed, including on error or user
interrupt. This can often be done most conveniently from an on.exit action in the calling R
function – see pwilcox for an example.
Do not assume that memory allocated by Calloc/Realloc comes from the same pool as used
by malloc: in particular do not use free or strdup with it.
These entry points need to be prefixed by R_ if STRICT_R_HEADERS has been defined.

6.2 Error handling
The basic error handling routines are the equivalents of stop and warning in R code, and use
the same interface.
void error(const char * format, ...);
void warning(const char * format, ...);
These have the same call sequences as calls to printf, but in the simplest case can be called
with a single character string argument giving the error message. (Don’t do this if the string
contains ‘%’ or might otherwise be interpreted as a format.)


If STRICT_R_HEADERS is not defined there is also an S-compatibility interface which uses calls
of the form
PROBLEM ...... ERROR
MESSAGE ...... WARN
PROBLEM ...... RECOVER(NULL_ENTRY)
MESSAGE ...... WARNING(NULL_ENTRY)
the last two being the forms available in all S versions. Here ‘......’ is a set of arguments to
printf, so can be a string or a format string followed by arguments separated by commas.

6.2.1 Error handling from FORTRAN
There are two interface function provided to call error and warning from FORTRAN code, in
each case with a simple character string argument. They are defined as
subroutine rexit(message )
subroutine rwarn(message )
Messages of more than 255 characters are truncated, with a warning.

6.3 Random number generation
The interface to R’s internal random number generation routines is
double unif_rand();
double norm_rand();
double exp_rand();
giving one uniform, normal or exponential pseudo-random variate. However, before these are
used, the user must call
GetRNGstate();
and after all the required variates have been generated, call
PutRNGstate();
These essentially read in (or create) .Random.seed and write it out after use.
File ‘S.h’ defines seed_in and seed_out for S-compatibility rather than GetRNGstate and
PutRNGstate. These take a long * argument which is ignored.
The random number generator is private to R; there is no way to select the kind of RNG or
set the seed except by evaluating calls to the R functions.
The C code behind R’s rxxx functions can be accessed by including the header file ‘Rmath.h’;
See Section 6.7.1 [Distribution functions], page 104. Those calls generate a single variate and
should also be enclosed in calls to GetRNGstate and PutRNGstate.
In addition, there is an interface (defined in header ‘R_ext/Applic.h’) to the generation of
random 2-dimensional tables with given row and column totals using Patefield’s algorithm.

void rcont2 (int* nrow, int* ncol, int* nrowt, int* ncolt, int* ntotal, [Function]
double* fact, int* jwork, int* matrix )
Here, nrow and ncol give the numbers nr and nc of rows and columns and nrowt and ncolt
the corresponding row and column totals, respectively, ntotal gives the sum of the row (or
columns) totals, jwork is a workspace of length nc, and on output matrix a contains the
nr ∗ nc generated random counts in the usual column-major order.


6.4 Missing and IEEE special values
A set of functions is provided to test for NA, Inf, -Inf and NaN. These functions are accessed
via macros:
ISNA(x ) True for R’s NA only
ISNAN(x ) True for R’s NA and IEEE NaN
R_FINITE(x ) False for Inf, -Inf, NA, NaN
and via function R_IsNaN which is true for NaN but not NA.
Do use R_FINITE rather than isfinite or finite; the latter is often mendacious and
isfinite is only available on a few platforms, on which R_FINITE is a macro expanding to
isfinite.
Currently in C code ISNAN is a macro calling isnan. (Since this gives problems on some C++
systems, if the R headers is called from C++ code a function call is used.)
You can check for Inf or -Inf by testing equality to R_PosInf or R_NegInf, and set (but
not test) an NA as NA_REAL.
All of the above apply to double variables only. For integer variables there is a variable
accessed by the macro NA_INTEGER which can used to set or test for missingness.

6.5 Printing
The most useful function for printing from a C routine compiled into R is Rprintf. This is used
in exactly the same way as printf, but is guaranteed to write to R’s output (which might be
a GUI console rather than a file). It is wise to write complete lines (including the n) before
returning to R.
The function REprintf is similar but writes on the error stream (stderr) which may or
may not be different from the standard output stream. Functions Rvprintf and REvprintf are
analogues using the vprintf interface.

6.5.1 Printing from FORTRAN
On many systems FORTRAN write and print statements can be used, but the output may
not interleave well with that of C, and will be invisible on GUI interfaces. They are not portable
and best avoided.
Three subroutines are provided to ease the output of information from FORTRAN code.
subroutine dblepr(label, nchar, data, ndata )
subroutine realpr(label, nchar, data, ndata )
subroutine intpr (label, nchar, data, ndata )
Here label is a character label of up to 255 characters, nchar is its length (which can be -1 if the
whole label is to be used), and data is an array of length at least ndata of the appropriate type
(double precision, real and integer respectively). These routines print the label on one line
and then print data as if it were an R vector on subsequent line(s). They work with zero ndata,
and so can be used to print a label alone.

6.6 Calling C from FORTRAN and vice versa
Naming conventions for symbols generated by FORTRAN differ by platform: it is not safe to
assume that FORTRAN names appear to C with a trailing underscore. To help cover up the
platform-specific differences there is a set of macros that should be used.
F77_SUB(name )
to define a function in C to be called from FORTRAN
F77_NAME(name )
to declare a FORTRAN routine in C before use


F77_CALL(name )
to call a FORTRAN routine from C
F77_COMDECL(name )
to declare a FORTRAN common block in C
F77_COM(name )
to access a FORTRAN common block from C

On most current platforms these are all the same, but it is unwise to rely on this. Note that
names with underscores are not legal in FORTRAN 77, and are not portably handled by the
above macros. (Also, all FORTRAN names for use by R are lower case, but this is not enforced
by the macros.)
For example, suppose we want to call R’s normal random numbers from FORTRAN. We
need a C wrapper along the lines of
#include R.h

void F77_SUB(rndstart)(void) { GetRNGstate(); }
void F77_SUB(rndend)(void) { PutRNGstate(); }
double F77_SUB(normrnd)(void) { return norm_rand(); }
to be called from FORTRAN as in
subroutine testit()
double precision normrnd, x
call rndstart()
x = normrnd()
call dblepr(X was, 5, x, 1)
call rndend()
end
Note that this is not guaranteed to be portable, for the return conventions might not be com-
patible between the C and FORTRAN compilers used. (Passing values via arguments is safer.)
The standard packages, for example stats, are a rich source of further examples.

6.7 Numerical analysis subroutines
R contains a large number of mathematical functions for its own use, for example numerical
linear algebra computations and special functions.
The header files ‘R_ext/BLAS.h’, ‘R_ext/Lapack.h’ and ‘R_ext/Linpack.h’ contains decla-
rations of the BLAS, LAPACK and LINPACK/EISPACK linear algebra functions included in
R. These are expressed as calls to FORTRAN subroutines, and they will also be usable from
users’ FORTRAN code. Although not part of the official API, this set of subroutines is unlikely
to change (but might be supplemented).
The header file ‘Rmath.h’ lists many other functions that are available and documented in
the following subsections. Many of these are C interfaces to the code behind R functions, so the
R function documentation may give further details.

6.7.1 Distribution functions
The routines used to calculate densities, cumulative distribution functions and quantile functions
for the standard statistical distributions are available as entry points.
The arguments for the entry points follow the pattern of those for the normal distribution:


double dnorm(double x, double mu, double sigma, int give_log );
double pnorm(double x, double mu, double sigma, int lower_tail,
int give_log );
double qnorm(double p, double mu, double sigma, int lower_tail,
int log_p );
double rnorm(double mu, double sigma );
That is, the first argument gives the position for the density and CDF and probability for the
quantile function, followed by the distribution’s parameters. Argument lower tail should be
TRUE (or 1) for normal use, but can be FALSE (or 0) if the probability of the upper tail is desired
or specified.
Finally, give log should be non-zero if the result is required on log scale, and log p should
be non-zero if p has been specified on log scale.
Note that you directly get the cumulative (or “integrated”) hazard function, H(t) = − log(1−
F (t)), by using
- pdist (t, ..., /*lower_tail = */ FALSE, /* give_log = */ TRUE)
or shorter (and more cryptic) - pdist (t, ..., 0, 1).
The random-variate generation routine rnorm returns one normal variate. See Section 6.3
[Random numbers], page 102, for the protocol in using the random-variate routines.
Note that these argument sequences are (apart from the names and that rnorm has no n)
mainly the same as the corresponding R functions of the same name, so the documentation of the
R functions can be used. Note that the exponential and gamma distributions are parametrized
by scale rather than rate.
For reference, the following table gives the basic name (to be prefixed by ‘d’, ‘p’, ‘q’ or ‘r’
apart from the exceptions noted) and distribution-specific arguments for the complete set of
distributions.
beta beta a, b
non-central beta nbeta a, b, ncp
binomial binom n, p
Cauchy cauchy location, scale
chi-squared chisq df
non-central chi-squared nchisq df, ncp
exponential exp scale (and not rate)
F f n1, n2
non-central F nf n1, n2, ncp
gamma gamma shape, scale
geometric geom p
hypergeometric hyper NR, NB, n
logistic logis location, scale
lognormal lnorm logmean, logsd
negative binomial nbinom size, prob
normal norm mu, sigma
Poisson pois lambda
Student’s t t n
non-central t nt df, delta
Studentized range tukey (*) rr, cc, df
uniform unif a, b
Weibull weibull shape, scale
Wilcoxon rank sum wilcox m, n
Wilcoxon signed rank signrank n


Entries marked with an asterisk only have ‘p’ and ‘q’ functions available, and none of the
non-central distributions have ‘r’ functions. After a call to dwilcox, pwilcox or qwilcox the
function wilcox_free() should be called, and similarly for the signed rank functions.

6.7.2 Mathematical functions
double gammafn (double x ) [Function]
double lgammafn (double x ) [Function]
double digamma (double x ) [Function]
double trigamma (double x ) [Function]
double tetragamma (double x ) [Function]
double pentagamma (double x ) [Function]
double psigamma (double x, double deriv ) [Function]
The Gamma function, the natural logarithm of its absolute value and first four derivatives
and the n-th derivative of Psi, the digamma function.
double beta (double a, double b ) [Function]
double lbeta (double a, double b ) [Function]
The (complete) Beta function and its natural logarithm.
double choose (double n, double k ) [Function]
double lchoose (double n, double k ) [Function]
The number of combinations of k items chosen from from n and its natural logarithm. k is
rounded to the nearest integer (with a warning if needed).
double bessel_i (double x, double nu, double expo ) [Function]
double bessel_j (double x, double nu ) [Function]
double bessel_k (double x, double nu, double expo ) [Function]
double bessel_y (double x, double nu ) [Function]
Bessel functions of types I, J, K and Y with index nu. For bessel_i and bessel_k there
is the option to return exp(-x) I(x; nu) or exp(x) K(x; nu) if expo is 2. (Use expo == 1 for
unscaled values.)

6.7.3 Numerical Utilities
There are a few other numerical utility functions available as entry points.
double R_pow (double x, double y ) [Function]
double R_pow_di (double x, int i ) [Function]
R_pow(x, y ) and R_pow_di(x, i ) compute x ^y and x ^i , respectively using R_FINITE
checks and returning the proper result (the same as R) for the cases where x, y or i are
0 or missing or infinite or NaN.
double pythag (double a, double b ) [Function]
pythag(a, b ) computes sqrt(a ^2 + b ^2) without overflow or destructive underflow: for
example it still works when both a and b are between 1e200 and 1e300 (in IEEE double
precision).
double log1p (double x ) [Function]
Computes log(1 + x ) (log 1 plus x ), accurately even for small x, i.e., |x| 1.
This may be provided by your platform, in which case it is not included in ‘Rmath.h’, but
is (probably) in ‘math.h’ which ‘Rmath.h’ includes. For backwards compatibility with R
versions prior to 1.5.0, the entry point Rf_log1p is still provided.
double log1pmx (double x ) [Function]
Computes log(1 + x ) - x (log 1 plus x minus x), accurately even for small x, i.e., |x| 1.


double expm1 (double x ) [Function]
Computes exp(x ) - 1 (exp x minus 1 ), accurately even for small x, i.e., |x| 1.
This may be provided by your platform, in which case it is not included in ‘Rmath.h’, but is
(probably) in ‘math.h’ which ‘Rmath.h’ includes.

double lgamma1p (double x ) [Function]
Computes log(gamma(x + 1)) (log(gamma(1 plus x))), accurately even for small x, i.e., 0
x 0.5.

double logspace_add (double logx, double logy ) [Function]
double logspace_sub (double logx, double logy ) [Function]
Compute the log of a sum or difference from logs of terms, i.e., “x + y” as log (exp(logx )
+ exp(logy )) and “x - y” as log (exp(logx ) - exp(logy )), without causing overflows or
throwing away too much accuracy.

int imax2 (int x, int y ) [Function]
int imin2 (int x, int y ) [Function]
double fmax2 (double x, double y ) [Function]
double fmin2 (double x, double y ) [Function]
Return the larger (max) or smaller (min) of two integer or double numbers, respectively.

double sign (double x ) [Function]
Compute the signum function, where sign(x) is 1, 0, or −1, when x is positive, 0, or negative,
respectively.

double fsign (double x, double y ) [Function]
Performs “transfer of sign” and is defined as |x| ∗ sign(y).

double fprec (double x, double digits ) [Function]
Returns the value of x rounded to digits decimal digits (after the decimal point).
This is the function used by R’s round().

double fround (double x, double digits ) [Function]
Returns the value of x rounded to digits significant decimal digits.
This is the function used by R’s signif().

double ftrunc (double x ) [Function]
Returns the value of x truncated (to an integer value) towards zero.

6.7.4 Mathematical constants
R has a set of commonly used mathematical constants encompassing constants usually found
‘math.h’ and contains further ones that are used in statistical computations. All these are
defined to (at least) 30 digits accuracy in ‘Rmath.h’. The following definitions use ln(x) for the
natural logarithm (log(x) in R).

Name Definition (ln = log) round(value, 7)
M_E e 2.7182818
M_LOG2E log2(e) 1.4426950
M_LOG10E log10(e) 0.4342945
M_LN2 ln(2) 0.6931472
M_LN10 ln(10) 2.3025851
M_PI π 3.1415927
M_PI_2 π/2 1.5707963


M_PI_4 π/4 0.7853982
M_1_PI 1/π 0.3183099
M_2_PI 2/π 0.6366198
M_2_SQRTPI 2/sqrt(π) 1.1283792
M_SQRT2 sqrt(2) 1.4142136
M_SQRT1_2 1/sqrt(2) 0.7071068
M_SQRT_3 sqrt(3) 1.7320508
M_SQRT_32 sqrt(32) 5.6568542
M_LOG10_2 log10(2) 0.3010300
M_2PI 2π 6.2831853
M_SQRT_PI sqrt(π) 1.7724539
M_1_SQRT_2PI 1/sqrt(2π) 0.3989423
M_SQRT_2dPI sqrt(2/π) 0.7978846
M_LN_SQRT_PI ln(sqrt(π)) 0.5723649
M_LN_SQRT_2PI ln(sqrt(2π)) 0.9189385
M_LN_SQRT_PId2 ln(sqrt(π/2)) 0.2257914
There are a set of constants (PI, DOUBLE_EPS) (and so on) defined (unless STRICT_R_HEADERS
is defined) in the included header ‘R_ext/Constants.h’, mainly for compatibility with S.
Further, the included header ‘R_ext/Boolean.h’ has constants TRUE and FALSE = 0 of type
Rboolean in order to provide a way of using “logical” variables in C consistently.

6.8 Optimization
The C code underlying optim can be accessed directly. The user needs to supply a function to
compute the function to be minimized, of the type
typedef double optimfn(int n, double *par, void *ex);
where the first argument is the number of parameters in the second argument. The third
argument is a pointer passed down from the calling routine, normally used to carry auxiliary
information.
Some of the methods also require a gradient function
typedef void optimgr(int n, double *par, double *gr, void *ex);
which passes back the gradient in the gr argument. No function is provided for finite-differencing,
nor for approximating the Hessian at the result.
The interfaces (defined in header ‘R_ext/Applic.h’) are
• Nelder Mead:
void nmmin(int n, double *xin, double *x, double *Fmin, optimfn fn,
int *fail, double abstol, double intol, void *ex,
double alpha, double beta, double gamma, int trace,
int *fncount, int maxit);
• BFGS:
void vmmin(int n, double *x, double *Fmin,
optimfn fn, optimgr gr, int maxit, int trace,
int *mask, double abstol, double reltol, int nREPORT,
void *ex, int *fncount, int *grcount, int *fail);
• Conjugate gradients:
void cgmin(int n, double *xin, double *x, double *Fmin,
optimfn fn, optimgr gr, int *fail, double abstol,
double intol, void *ex, int type, int trace,
int *fncount, int *grcount, int maxit);


• Limited-memory BFGS with bounds:
void lbfgsb(int n, int lmm, double *x, double *lower,
double *upper, int *nbd, double *Fmin, optimfn fn,
optimgr gr, int *fail, void *ex, double factr,
double pgtol, int *fncount, int *grcount,
int maxit, char *msg, int trace, int nREPORT);
• Simulated annealing:
void samin(int n, double *x, double *Fmin, optimfn fn, int maxit,
int tmax, double temp, int trace, void *ex);
Many of the arguments are common to the various methods. n is the number of parameters, x
or xin is the starting parameters on entry and x the final parameters on exit, with final value
returned in Fmin. Most of the other parameters can be found from the help page for optim: see
the source code ‘src/appl/lbfgsb.c’ for the values of nbd, which specifies which bounds are
to be used.

6.9 Integration
The C code underlying integrate can be accessed directly. The user needs to supply a vector-
izing C function to compute the function to be integrated, of the type
typedef void integr_fn(double *x, int n, void *ex);
where x[] is both input and output and has length n, i.e., a C function, say fn, of type integr_
fn must basically do for(i in 1:n) x[i] := f(x[i], ex). The vectorization requirement can
be used to speed up the integrand instead of calling it n times. Note that in the current
implementation built on QUADPACK, n will be either 15 or 21. The ex argument is a pointer
passed down from the calling routine, normally used to carry auxiliary information.
There are interfaces (defined in header ‘R_ext/Applic.h’) for definite and for indefinite
integrals. ‘Indefinite’ means that at least one of the integration boundaries is not finite.
• Finite:
void Rdqags(integr_fn f, void *ex, double *a, double *b,
double *epsabs, double *epsrel,
double *result, double *abserr, int *neval, int *ier,
int *limit, int *lenw, int *last,
int *iwork, double *work);
• Indefinite:
void Rdqagi(integr_fn f, void *ex, double *bound, int *inf,
double *epsabs, double *epsrel,
double *result, double *abserr, int *neval, int *ier,
int *limit, int *lenw, int *last,
int *iwork, double *work);
Only the 3rd and 4th argument differ for the two integrators; for the definite integral, using
Rdqags, a and b are the integration interval bounds, whereas for an indefinite integral, using
Rdqagi, bound is the finite bound of the integration (if the integral is not doubly-infinite) and
inf is a code indicating the kind of integration range,
inf = 1 corresponds to (bound, +Inf),
inf = -1 corresponds to (-Inf, bound),
inf = 2 corresponds to (-Inf, +Inf),
f and ex define the integrand function, see above; epsabs and epsrel specify the absolute
and relative accuracy requested, result, abserr and last are the output components value,


abs.err and subdivisions of the R function integrate, where neval gives the number of
integrand function evaluations, and the error code ier is translated to R’s integrate() $
message, look at that function definition. limit corresponds to integrate(..., subdivisions
= *). It seems you should always define the two work arrays and the length of the second one
as
lenw = 4 * limit;
iwork = (int *) R_alloc(limit, sizeof(int));
work = (double *) R_alloc(lenw, sizeof(double));
The comments in the source code in ‘src/appl/integrate.c’ give more details, particularly
about reasons for failure (ier = 1).

6.10 Utility functions
R has a fairly comprehensive set of sort routines which are made available to users’ C code.
These are declared in header file ‘R_ext/Utils.h’ (included by ‘R.h’) and include the following.
void R_isort (int* x, int n ) [Function]
void R_rsort (double* x, int n ) [Function]
void R_csort (Rcomplex* x, int n ) [Function]
void rsort_with_index (double* x, int* index, int n ) [Function]
The first three sort integer, real (double) and complex data respectively. (Complex numbers
are sorted by the real part first then the imaginary part.) NAs are sorted last.
rsort_with_index sorts on x, and applies the same permutation to index. NAs are sorted
last.
void revsort (double* x, int* index, int n ) [Function]
Is similar to rsort_with_index but sorts into decreasing order, and NAs are not handled.
void iPsort (int* x, int n, int k ) [Function]
void rPsort (double* x, int n, int k ) [Function]
void cPsort (Rcomplex* x, int n, int k ) [Function]
These all provide (very) partial sorting: they permute x so that x [k ] is in the correct place
with smaller values to the left, larger ones to the right.
void R_qsort (double *v, int i, int j ) [Function]
void R_qsort_I (double *v, int *I, int i, int j ) [Function]
void R_qsort_int (int *iv, int i, int j ) [Function]
void R_qsort_int_I (int *iv, int *I, int i, int j ) [Function]
These routines sort v [i :j ] or iv [i :j ] (using 1-indexing, i.e., v [1] is the first element)
calling the quicksort algorithm as used by R’s sort(v, method = quick) and documented
on the help page for the R function sort. The ..._I() versions also return the sort.index()
vector in I. Note that the ordering is not stable, so tied values may be permuted.
Note that NAs are not handled (explicitly) and you should use different sorting functions if
NAs can be present.
subroutine qsort4 (double precision v, integer indx, integer ii, integer jj ) [Function]
subroutine qsort3 (double precision v, integer ii, integer jj ) [Function]
The FORTRAN interface routines for sorting double precision vectors are qsort3 and qsort4,
equivalent to R_qsort and R_qsort_I, respectively.
void R_max_col (double* matrix, int* nr, int* nc, int* maxes, int* [Function]
ties_meth )
Given the nr by nc matrix matrix in column-major (“FORTRAN”) order, R_max_col()
returns in maxes [i -1] the column number of the maximal element in the i-th row (the same


as R’s max.col() function). In the case of ties (multiple maxima), *ties_meth is an integer
code in 1:3 determining the method: 1 = “random”, 2 = “first” and 3 = “last”. See R’s
help page ?max.col.
int findInterval (double* xt, int n, double x, Rboolean [Function]
rightmost_closed, Rboolean all_inside, int ilo, int* mflag )
Given the ordered vector xt of length n, return the interval or index of x in xt [], typically
max(i; 1 ≤ i ≤ n xt[i] ≤ x) where we use 1-indexing as in R and FORTRAN (but not
C). If rightmost closed is true, also returns n − 1 if x equals xt[n]. If all inside is not 0, the
result is coerced to lie in 1:(n -1) even when x is outside the xt[] range. On return, *mflag
equals −1 if x xt[1], +1 if x = xt[n], and 0 otherwise.
The algorithm is particularly fast when ilo is set to the last result of findInterval() and x
is a value of a sequence which is increasing or decreasing for subsequent calls.
There is also an F77_CALL(interv)() version of findInterval() with the same arguments,
but all pointers.
The following two functions do numerical colorspace conversion from HSV to RGB and back.
Note that all colours must be in [0,1].
void hsv2rgb (double h, double s, double v, double *r, double *g, double *b ) [Function]
void rgb2hsv (double r, double g, double b, double *h, double *s, double *v ) [Function]
A system-independent interface to produce the name of a temporary file is provided as
char * R_tmpnam (const char *prefix ) [Function]
Return a pathname for a temporary file with name beginning with prefix. A NULL prefix is
replaced by .
There is also the internal function used to expand file names in several R functions, and
called directly by path.expand.
const char * R_ExpandFileName (const char *fn ) [Function]
Expand a path name fn by replacing a leading tilde by the user’s home directory (if defined).
The precise meaning is platform-specific; it will usually be taken from the environment vari-
able HOME if this is defined.

6.11 Re-encoding
R has its own C-level interface to the encoding conversion capabilities provided by iconv because
there are incompatibilities between the declarations in different implementations of iconv (and
before R 2.10.0 they provided a dummy interface when iconv was not supported).
These are declared in header file ‘R_ext/Riconv.h’.
void *Riconv_open (const char *to, const char *from ) [Function]
Set up a pointer to an encoding object to be used to convert between two encodings:
indicates the current locale.
size_t Riconv (void *cd, const char **inbuf, size t *inbytesleft, char [Function]
**outbuf, size t *outbytesleft )
Convert as much as possible of inbuf to outbuf. Initially the int variables indicate the
number of bytes available in the buffers, and they are updated (and the char pointers are
updated to point to the next free byte in the buffer). The return value is the number of
characters converted, or (size_t)-1 (beware: size_t is usually an unsigned type). It should
be safe to assume that an error condition sets errno to one of E2BIG (the output buffer is
full), EILSEQ (the input cannot be converted, and might be invalid in the encoding specified) or
EINVAL (the input does not end with a complete multi-byte character).


int Riconv_close (void * cd ) [Function]
Free the resources of an encoding object.

6.12 Allowing interrupts
No port of R can be interrupted whilst running long computations in compiled code, so pro-
grammers should make provision for the code to be interrupted at suitable points by calling
from C
#include R_ext/Utils.h

void R_CheckUserInterrupt(void);
and from FORTRAN
subroutine rchkusr()
These check if the user has requested an interrupt, and if so branch to R’s error handling
functions.
Note that it is possible that the code behind one of the entry points defined here if called
from your C or FORTRAN code could be interruptible or generate an error and so not return
to your code.

6.13 Platform and version information
The header files define USING_R, which can be used to test if the code is indeed being used with
R.
Header file ‘Rconfig.h’ (included by ‘R.h’) is used to define platform-specific macros that
are mainly for use in other header files. The macro WORDS_BIGENDIAN is defined on big-endian
systems (e.g. sparc-sun-solaris2.6) and not on little-endian systems (such as i686 under
Linux or Windows). It can be useful when manipulating binary files.
Header file ‘Rversion.h’ (not included by ‘R.h’) defines a macro R_VERSION giving the version
number encoded as an integer, plus a macro R_Version to do the encoding. This can be used to
test if the version of R is late enough, or to include back-compatibility features. For protection
against very old versions of R which did not have this macro, use a construction such as
#if defined(R_VERSION) R_VERSION = R_Version(1, 9, 0)
...
#endif
More detailed information is available in the macros R_MAJOR, R_MINOR, R_YEAR, R_MONTH and
R_DAY: see the header file ‘Rversion.h’ for their format. Note that the minor version includes
the patchlevel (as in ‘9.0’).

6.14 Inlining C functions
The C99 keyword inline is recognized by some compilers used to build R whereas others need
__inline__ or do not support inlining. Portable code can be written using the macro R_INLINE
(defined in file ‘Rconfig.h’ included by ‘R.h’), as for example from package cluster
#include R.h

static R_INLINE int ind_2(int l, int j)
{
...
}
Be aware that using inlining with functions in more than one compilation unit is almost
impossible to do portably: see http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/2003/03/inline.html. All


the R configure code has checked is that R_INLINE can be used in a single C file with the compiler
used to build R. We recommend that packages making extensive use of inlining include their
own configure code.

6.15 Controlling visibility
Header ‘R_ext/Visibility’ has some definitions for controlling the visibility of entry points.
These are only effective when ‘HAVE_VISIBILITY_ATTRIBUTE’ is defined – this is checked when
R is configured and recorded in header ‘Rconfig.h’ (included by ‘R_ext/Visibility.h’). It is
generally defined on modern Unix-alikes with a recent compiler (e.g. gcc4), but not supported on
Windows. Minimizing the visibility of symbols in a shared library will both speed up its loading
(unlikely to be significant) and reduce the possibility of linking to the wrong entry points of the
same name.
C/C++ entry points prefixed by attribute_hidden will not be visible in the shared object.
There is no comparable mechanism for FORTRAN entry points, but there is a more comprehen-
sive scheme used by, for example package stats. Most compilers which allow control of visibility
will allow control of visibility for all symbols via a flag, and where known the flag is encap-
sulated in the macros ‘C_VISIBILITY’ and F77_VISIBILITY for C and FORTRAN compilers.
These are defined in ‘etc/Makeconf’ and so available for normal compilation of package code.
For example, ‘src/Makevars’ could include
PKG_CFLAGS=$(C_VISIBILITY)
PKG_FFLAGS=$(F77_VISIBILITY)
This would end up with no visible entry points, which would be pointless. However, the
effect of the flags can be overridden by using the attribute_visible prefix. A shared object
which registers its entry points needs only for have one visible entry point, its initializer, so for
example package stats has
void attribute_visible R_init_stats(DllInfo *dll)
{
R_registerRoutines(dll, CEntries, CallEntries, FortEntries, NULL);
R_useDynamicSymbols(dll, FALSE);
...
}
The visibility mechanism is not available on Windows, but there is an equally
effective way to control which entry points are visible, by supplying a definitions file
‘pkgnme /src/pkgname-win.def’: only entry points listed in that file will be visible. Again
using stats as an example, it has
LIBRARY stats.dll
EXPORTS
R_init_stats

6.16 Using these functions in your own C code
It is possible to build Mathlib, the R set of mathematical functions documented in ‘Rmath.h’,
as a standalone library ‘libRmath’ under both Unix and Windows. (This includes the functions
documented in Section 6.7 [Numerical analysis subroutines], page 104 as from that header file.)
The library is not built automatically when R is installed, but can be built in the directory
‘src/nmath/standalone’ in the R sources: see the file ‘README’ there. To use the code in your
own C program include
#define MATHLIB_STANDALONE
#include Rmath.h
and link against ‘-lRmath’ (and perhaps ‘-lm’. There is an example file ‘test.c’.


A little care is needed to use the random-number routines. You will need to supply the
uniform random number generator
double unif_rand(void)
or use the one supplied (and with a dynamic library or DLL you will have to use the one supplied,
which is the Marsaglia-multicarry with an entry points
set_seed(unsigned int, unsigned int)
to set its seeds and
get_seed(unsigned int *, unsigned int *)
to read the seeds).

6.17 Organization of header files
The header files which R installs are in directory ‘R_INCLUDE_DIR ’ (default ‘R_HOME /include’).
This currently includes
‘R.h’ includes many other files
‘S.h’ different version for code ported from S
‘Rinternals.h’ definitions for using R’s internal structures
‘Rdefines.h’ macros for an S-like interface to the above
‘Rmath.h’ standalone math library
‘Rversion.h’ R version information
‘Rinterface.h’ for add-on front-ends (Unix-alikes only)
‘Rembedded.h’ for add-on front-ends
‘R_ext/Applic.h’ optimization and integration
‘R_ext/BLAS.h’ C definitions for BLAS routines
‘R_ext/Callbacks.h’ C (and R function) top-level task handlers
‘R_ext/GetX11Image.h’ X11Image interface used by package trkplot
‘R_ext/Lapack.h’ C definitions for some LAPACK routines
‘R_ext/Linpack.h’ C definitions for some LINPACK routines, not all
of which are included in R
‘R_ext/Parse.h’ a small part of R’s parse interface
‘R_ext/RConvertors.h’
‘R_ext/Rdynload.h’ needed to register compiled code in packages
‘R_ext/R-ftp-http.h’ interface to internal method of download.file
‘R_ext/Riconv.h’ interface to iconv
‘R_ext/RStartup.h’ for add-on front-ends
‘R_ext/Visibility.h’ definitions controlling visibility
‘R_ext/eventloop.h’ for add-on front-ends and for packages that need
to share in the R event loops (on all platforms)
The following headers are included by ‘R.h’:
‘Rconfig.h’ configuration info that is made available
‘R_ext/Arith.h’ handling for NAs, NaNs, Inf/-Inf
‘R_ext/Boolean.h’ TRUE/FALSE type
‘R_ext/Complex.h’ C typedefs for R’s complex
‘R_ext/Constants.h’ constants
‘R_ext/Error.h’ error handling
‘R_ext/Memory.h’ memory allocation
‘R_ext/Print.h’ Rprintf and variations.
‘R_ext/Random.h’ random number generation
‘R_ext/RS.h’ definitions common to ‘R.h’ and ‘S.h’, including
F77_CALL etc.


‘R_ext/Utils.h’ sorting and other utilities
‘R_ext/libextern.h’ definitions for exports from ‘R.dll’ on Windows.
The graphics systems are exposed in headers ‘R_ext/GraphicsEngine.h’,
‘R_ext/GraphicsDevice.h’ (which it includes) and ‘R_ext/QuartzDevice.h’. Some
entry points from the stats package are in ‘R_ext/stats_package.h’ (currently related to the
internals of nls and nlminb).

Chapter 7: Generic functions and methods 116

7 Generic functions and methods
R programmers will often want to add methods for existing generic functions, and may want to
add new generic functions or make existing functions generic. In this chapter we give guidelines
for doing so, with examples of the problems caused by not adhering to them.
This chapter only covers the ‘informal’ class system copied from S3, and not with the S4
(formal) methods of package methods.
The key function for methods is NextMethod, which dispatches the next method. It is quite
typical for a method function to make a few changes to its arguments, dispatch to the next
method, receive the results and modify them a little. An example is
t.data.frame - function(x)
{
x - as.matrix(x)
NextMethod(t)
}
Also consider predict.glm: it happens that in R for historical reasons it calls predict.lm di-
rectly, but in principle (and in S originally and currently) it could use NextMethod. (NextMethod
seems under-used in the R sources. Do be aware that there are S/R differences in this area, and
the example above works because there is a next method, the default method, not that a new
method is selected when the class is changed.)
Any method a programmer writes may be invoked from another method by NextMethod,
with the arguments appropriate to the previous method. Further, the programmer cannot predict
which method NextMethod will pick (it might be one not yet dreamt of), and the end user calling
the generic needs to be able to pass arguments to the next method. For this to work
A method must have all the arguments of the generic, including ... if the generic
does.
It is a grave misunderstanding to think that a method needs only to accept the arguments it
needs. The original S version of predict.lm did not have a ... argument, although predict
did. It soon became clear that predict.glm needed an argument dispersion to handle over-
dispersion. As predict.lm had neither a dispersion nor a ... argument, NextMethod could
no longer be used. (The legacy, two direct calls to predict.lm, lives on in predict.glm in R,
which is based on the workaround for S3 written by Venables Ripley.)
Further, the user is entitled to use positional matching when calling the generic, and the
arguments to a method called by UseMethod are those of the call to the generic. Thus
A method must have arguments in exactly the same order as the generic.
To see the scale of this problem, consider the generic function scale, defined as
scale - function (x, center = TRUE, scale = TRUE)
UseMethod(scale)
Suppose an unthinking package writer created methods such as
scale.foo - function(x, scale = FALSE, ...) { }
Then for x of class foo the calls
scale(x, , TRUE)
scale(x, scale = TRUE)
would do most likely do different things, to the justifiable consternation of the end user.
To add a further twist, which default is used when a user calls scale(x) in our example?
What if

Chapter 7: Generic functions and methods 117

scale.bar - function(x, center, scale = TRUE) NextMethod(scale)
and x has class c(bar, foo)? It is the default specified in the method that is used, but the
default specified in the generic may be the one the user sees. This leads to the recommendation:
If the generic specifies defaults, all methods should use the same defaults.
An easy way to follow these recommendations is to always keep generics simple, e.g.
scale - function(x, ...) UseMethod(scale)
Only add parameters and defaults to the generic if they make sense in all possible methods
implementing it.

7.1 Adding new generics
When creating a new generic function, bear in mind that its argument list will be the maximal
set of arguments for methods, including those written elsewhere years later. So choosing a good
set of arguments may well be an important design issue, and there need to be good arguments
not to include a ... argument.
If a ... argument is supplied, some thought should be given to its position in the argument
sequence. Arguments which follow ... must be named in calls to the function, and they must
be named in full (partial matching is suppressed after ...). Formal arguments before ... can
be partially matched, and so may ‘swallow’ actual arguments intended for .... Although it is
commonplace to make the ... argument the last one, that is not always the right choice.
Sometimes package writers want to make generic a function in the base package, and request
a change in R. This may be justifiable, but making a function generic with the old definition as
the default method does have a small performance cost. It is never necessary, as a package can
take over a function in the base package and make it generic by
foo - function(object, ...) UseMethod(foo)
foo.default - base::foo
(If the thus defined default method needs a ‘...’ added to its argument list, one can e.g. use
formals(foo.default) - c(formals(foo.default), alist(... = )).)
The same idea can be applied for functions in other packages with name spaces.

Chapter 8: Linking GUIs and other front-ends to R 118

8 Linking GUIs and other front-ends to R
There are a number of ways to build front-ends to R: we take this to mean a GUI or other
application that has the ability to submit commands to R and perhaps to receive results back (not
necessarily in a text format). There are other routes besides those described here, for example
the package Rserve (from CRAN, see also http://www.rforge.net/Rserve/) and connections
to Java in ‘SJava’ (see http://www.omegahat.org/RSJava/ and ‘JRI’, part of the rJava package
on CRAN).

8.1 Embedding R under Unix-alikes
R can be built as a shared library1 if configured with ‘--enable-R-shlib’. This shared library
can be used to run R from alternative front-end programs. We will assume this has been done for
the rest of this section. In addition, from R 2.7.0 it can be built as a static library if configured
with ‘--enable-R-static-lib’, and this can be used in a very similar way.
The command-line R front-end, ‘R_HOME /bin/exec/R’ is one such example, and the former
GNOME (see package gnomeGUI on CRAN’s ‘Archive’ area) and Mac OS X consoles are others.
The source for ‘R_HOME /bin/exec/R’ is in file ‘src/main/Rmain.c’ and is very simple
int Rf_initialize_R(int ac, char **av); /* in ../unix/system.c */
void Rf_mainloop(); /* in main.c */

extern int R_running_as_main_program; /* in ../unix/system.c */

int main(int ac, char **av)
{
R_running_as_main_program = 1;
Rf_initialize_R(ac, av);
Rf_mainloop(); /* does not return */
return 0;
}
indeed, misleadingly simple. Remember that ‘R_HOME /bin/exec/R’ is run from a shell script
‘R_HOME /bin/R’ which sets up the environment for the executable, and this is used for
• Setting R_HOME and checking it is valid, as well as the path R_SHARE_DIR and R_DOC_DIR
to the installed ‘share’ and ‘doc’ directory trees. Also setting R_ARCH if needed.
• Setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH to include the directories used in linking R. This is recorded as
the default setting of R_LD_LIBRARY_PATH in the shell script ‘R_HOME /etcR_ARCH /ldpaths’.
• Processing some of the arguments, for example to run R under a debugger and to launch
alternative front-ends to provide GUIs.
The first two of these can be achieved for your front-end by running it via R CMD. So, for example
R CMD /usr/local/lib/R/bin/exec/R
R CMD exec/R
will both work in a standard R installation. (R CMD looks first for executables in ‘R_HOME /bin’.)
If you do not want to run your front-end in this way, you need to ensure that R_HOME is set
and LD_LIBRARY_PATH is suitable. (The latter might well be, but modern Unix/Linux systems
do not normally include ‘/usr/local/lib’ (‘/usr/local/lib64’ on some architectures), and R
does look there for system components.)
The other senses in which this example is too simple are that all the internal defaults
are used and that control is handed over to the R main loop. There are a number of small
1
In the parlance of Mac OS X this is a dynamic library, and is the normal way to build R on that platform.


examples2 in the ‘tests/Embedding’ directory. These make use of Rf_initEmbeddedR in
‘src/main/Rembedded.c’, and essentially use
#include Rembedded.h

int main(int ac, char **av)
{
/* do some setup */
Rf_initEmbeddedR(argc, argv);
/* do some more setup */

/* submit some code to R, which is done interactively via
run_Rmainloop();

A possible substitute for a pseudo-console is

R_ReplDLLinit();
while(R_ReplDLLdo1() 0) {
/* add user actions here if desired */
}

*/
Rf_endEmbeddedR(0);
/* final tidying up after R is shutdown */
return 0;
}
If you don’t want to pass R arguments, you can fake an argv array, for example by
char *argv[]= {REmbeddedPostgres, --silent};
Rf_initEmbeddedR(sizeof(argv)/sizeof(argv[0]), argv);
However, to make a GUI we usually do want to run run_Rmainloop after setting up various
parts of R to talk to our GUI, and arranging for our GUI callbacks to be called during the R
mainloop.
One issue to watch is that on some platforms Rf_initEmbeddedR and Rf_endEmbeddedR
change the settings of the FPU (e.g. to allow errors to be trapped and to set extended precision
registers).
The standard code sets up a session temporary directory in the usual way, unless R_TempDir
is set to a non-NULL value before Rf_initEmbeddedR is called. In that case the value is assumed
to contain an existing writable directory (no check is done), and it is not cleaned up when R is
shut down.
Rf_initEmbeddedR sets R to be in interactive mode: you can set R_Interactive (defined in
‘Rinterface.h’) subsequently to change this.
Note that R expects to be run with the locale category ‘LC_NUMERIC’ set to its default value
of C, and so should not be embedded into an application which changes that.

8.1.1 Compiling against the R library
Suitable flags to compile and link against the R (shared or static) library can be found by
R CMD config --cppflags
R CMD config --ldflags

2
but these are not part of the automated test procedures and so little tested.


If R is installed, pkg-config is available and sub-architectures have not been used, alterna-
tives for a shared R library are
pkg-config --cflags libR
pkg-config --libs libR
and for a static R library
pkg-config --cflags libR
pkg-config --libs --static libR

8.1.2 Setting R callbacks
For Unix-alikes there is a public header file ‘Rinterface.h’ that makes it possible to change the
standard callbacks used by R in a documented way. This defines pointers (if R_INTERFACE_PTRS
is defined)
extern void
(*ptr_R_Suicide)(const char *);
extern void
(*ptr_R_ShowMessage)(const char *);
extern int(*ptr_R_ReadConsole)(const char *, unsigned char *, int, int);
extern void
(*ptr_R_WriteConsole)(const char *, int);
extern void
(*ptr_R_WriteConsoleEx)(const char *, int, int);
extern void
(*ptr_R_ResetConsole)();
extern void
(*ptr_R_FlushConsole)();
extern void
(*ptr_R_ClearerrConsole)();
extern void
(*ptr_R_Busy)(int);
extern void
(*ptr_R_CleanUp)(SA_TYPE, int, int);
extern int(*ptr_R_ShowFiles)(int, const char **, const char **,
const char *, Rboolean, const char *);
extern int (*ptr_R_ChooseFile)(int, char *, int);
extern int (*ptr_R_EditFile)(const char *);
extern void (*ptr_R_loadhistory)(SEXP, SEXP, SEXP, SEXP);
extern void (*ptr_R_savehistory)(SEXP, SEXP, SEXP, SEXP);
extern void (*ptr_R_addhistory)(SEXP, SEXP, SEXP, SEXP);
which allow standard R callbacks to be redirected to your GUI. What these do is generally
documented in the file ‘src/unix/system.txt’.

void R_ShowMessage (char *message ) [Function]
This should display the message, which may have multiple lines: it should be brought to the
user’s attention immediately.

void R_Busy (int which ) [Function]
This function invokes actions (such as change of cursor) when R embarks on an extended
computation (which =1) and when such a state terminates (which =0).

int R_ReadConsole (const char *prompt, unsigned char *buf, int buflen, [Function]
int hist )
void R_WriteConsole (const char *buf, int buflen ) [Function]
void R_WriteConsoleEx (const char *buf, int buflen, int otype ) [Function]
void R_ResetConsole () [Function]
void R_FlushConsole () [Function]
void R_ClearErrConsole () [Function]
These functions interact with a console.
R_ReadConsole prints the given prompt at the console and then does a gets(3)–like opera-
tion, transferring up to buflen characters into the buffer buf. The last two bytes should be
set to ‘n0’ to preserve sanity. If hist is non-zero, then the line should be added to any


command history which is being maintained. The return value is 0 is no input is available
and 0 otherwise.
R_WriteConsoleEx writes the given buffer to the console, otype specifies the output type
(regular output or warning/error). Call to R_WriteConsole(buf, buflen) is equivalent to
R_WriteConsoleEx(buf, buflen, 0). To ensure backward compatibility of the callbacks,
ptr_R_WriteConsoleEx is used only if ptr_R_WriteConsole is set to NULL. To ensure that
stdout() and stderr() connections point to the console, set the corresponding files to NULL
via
R_Outputfile = NULL;
R_Consolefile = NULL;
R_ResetConsole is called when the system is reset after an error. R_FlushConsole is called
to flush any pending output to the system console. R_ClearerrConsole clears any errors
associated with reading from the console.

int R_ShowFiles (int nfile, const char **file, const char **headers, [Function]
const char *wtitle, Rboolean del, const char *pager )
This function is used to display the contents of files.

int R_ChooseFile (int new, char *buf, int len ) [Function]
Choose a file and return its name in buf of length len. Return value is 0 for success, 0
otherwise.

int R_EditFile (const char *buf ) [Function]
Send a file to an editor window.

SEXP R_loadhistory (SEXP, SEXP, SEXP, SEXP); [Function]
SEXP R_savehistory (SEXP, SEXP, SEXP, SEXP); [Function]
SEXP R_addhistory (SEXP, SEXP, SEXP, SEXP); [Function]
.Internal functions for loadhistory, savehistory and timestamp: these are called after
checking the number of arguments.
If the console has no history mechanism these can be as simple as
SEXP R_loadhistory (SEXP call, SEXP op, SEXP args, SEXP env)
{
errorcall(call, loadhistory is not implemented);
return R_NilValue;
}
SEXP R_savehistory (SEXP call, SEXP op , SEXP args, SEXP env)
{
errorcall(call, savehistory is not implemented);
return R_NilValue;
}
SEXP R_addhistory (SEXP call, SEXP op , SEXP args, SEXP env)
{
return R_NilValue;
}
The R_addhistory function should return silently if no history mechanism is present, as a
user may be calling timestamp purely to write the time stamp to the console.

void R_Suicide (const char *message ) [Function]
This should abort R as rapidly as possible, displaying the message. A possible implementation
is


void R_Suicide (const char *message)
{
char pp[1024];
snprintf(pp, 1024, Fatal error: %sn, s);
R_ShowMessage(pp);
R_CleanUp(SA_SUICIDE, 2, 0);
}
void R_CleanUp (SA TYPE saveact, int status, int RunLast ) [Function]
This function invokes any actions which occur at system termination. It needs to be quite
complex:
#include Rinterface.h
#include Rembedded.h /* for Rf_KillAllDevices */

void R_CleanUp (SA_TYPE saveact, int status, int RunLast)
{
if(saveact == SA_DEFAULT) saveact = SaveAction;
if(saveact == SA_SAVEASK) {
/* ask what to do and set saveact */
}
switch (saveact) {
case SA_SAVE:
if(runLast) R_dot_Last();
if(R_DirtyImage) R_SaveGlobalEnv();
/* save the console history in R_HistoryFile */
break;
case SA_NOSAVE:
if(runLast) R_dot_Last();
break;
case SA_SUICIDE:
default:
break;
}

R_RunExitFinalizers();
/* clean up after the editor e.g. CleanEd() */

R_CleanTempDir();

/* close all the graphics devices */
if(saveact != SA_SUICIDE) Rf_KillAllDevices();
fpu_setup(FALSE);

exit(status);
}

8.1.3 Registering symbols
An application embedding R needs a different way of registering symbols because it is not a
dynamic library loaded by R as would be the case with a package. Therefore R reserves a
special DllInfo entry for the embedding application such that it can register symbols to be
used with .C, .Call etc. This entry can be obtained by calling getEmbeddingDllInfo, so a
typical use is


DllInfo *info = R_getEmbeddingDllInfo();
R_registerRoutines(info, cMethods, callMethods, NULL, NULL);
The native routines defined by cMethod and callMethods should be present in the embedding
application. See Section 5.4 [Registering native routines], page 70 for details on registering
symbols in general.

8.1.4 Meshing event loops
One of the most difficult issues in interfacing R to a front-end is the handling of event loops, at
least if a single thread is used. R uses events and timers for
• Running X11 windows such as the graphics device and data editor, and interacting with
them (e.g., using locator()).
• Supporting Tcl/Tk events for the tcltk package (for at least the X11 version of Tk).
• Preparing input.
• Timing operations, for example for profiling R code and Sys.sleep().
• Interrupts, where permitted.
Specifically, the Unix command-line version of R runs separate event loops for
• Preparing input at the console command-line, in file ‘src/unix/sys-unix.c’.
• Waiting for a response from a socket in the internal functions underlying FTP and
HTTP transfers in download.file() and for direct socket access, in files ‘src/modules/
internet/nanoftp.c’, ‘src/modules/internet/nanohttp.c’ and ‘src/modules/
internet/Rsock.c’
• Mouse and window events when displaying the X11-based dataentry window, in file
‘src/modules/X11/dataentry.c’. This is regarded as modal, and no other events are
serviced whilst it is active.
There is a protocol for adding event handlers to the first two types of event loops, using
types and functions declared in the header ‘R_ext/eventloop.h’ and described in comments in
file ‘src/unix/sys-std.c’. It is possible to add (or remove) an input handler for events on a
particular file descriptor, or to set a polling interval (via R_wait_usec) and a function to be
called periodically via R_PolledEvents: the polling mechanism is used by the tcltk package.
An alternative front-end needs both to make provision for other R events whilst waiting for
input, and to ensure that it is not frozen out during events of the second type. This is not
handled very well in the existing examples. The GNOME front-end can run a own handler for
polled events by setting
extern int (*R_timeout_handler)();
extern long R_timeout_val;

if (R_timeout_handler R_timeout_val)
gtk_timeout_add(R_timeout_val, R_timeout_handler, NULL);
gtk_main ();
whilst it is waiting for console input. This obviously handles events for Gtk windows (such as the
graphics device in the gtkDevice package), but not X11 events (such as the X11() device) or for
other event handlers that might have been registered with R. It does not attempt to keep itself
alive whilst R is waiting on sockets. The ability to add a polled handler as R_timeout_handler
is used by the tcltk package.

8.1.5 Threading issues
Embedded R is designed to be run in the main thread, and all the testing is done in that context.
There is a potential issue with the stack-checking mechanism where threads are involved. This
uses two variables declared in ‘Rinterface.h’ (if CSTACK_DEFNS is defined) as


extern uintptr_t R_CStackLimit; /* C stack limit */
extern uintptr_t R_CStackStart; /* Initial stack address */
Note that uintptr_t is a C99 type for which a substitute is defined in R, so your code needs to
define HAVE_UINTPTR_T appropriately.
These will be set3 when Rf_initialize_R is called, to values appropriate to the main thread.
Stack-checking can be disabled by setting R_CStackLimit = (uintptr_t)-1, but it is better to
if possible set appropriate values. (What these are and how to determine them are OS-specific,
and the stack size limit may differ for secondary threads. If you have a choice of stack size, at
least 8Mb is recommended.)
You may also want to consider how signals are handled: R sets signal handlers for sev-
eral signals, including SIGINT, SIGSEGV, SIGPIPE, SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2, but these can all be
suppressed by setting the variable R_SignalHandlers (declared in ‘Rinterface.h’) to 0.

8.2 Embedding R under Windows
All Windows interfaces to R call entry points in the DLL ‘R.dll’, directly or indirectly. Simpler
applications may find it easier to use the indirect route via (D)COM.

8.2.1 Using (D)COM
(D)COM is a standard Windows mechanism used for communication between Windows appli-
cations. One application (here R) is run as COM server which offers services to clients, here
the front-end calling application. The services are described in a ‘Type Library’ and are (more
or less) language-independent, so the calling application can be written in C or C++ or Visual
Basic or Perl or Python and so on. The ‘D’ in (D)COM refers to ‘distributed’, as the client and
server can be running on different machines.
The basic R distribution is not a (D)COM server, but two addons are currently available
that interface directly with R and provide a (D)COM server:
• There is a (D)COM server called StatConnector written by Thomas Baier available
on CRAN (http://cran.r-project.org/other-software.html) which works with
‘Rproxy.dll’ (in the R distribution) and ‘R.dll’ to support transfer of data to and from
R and remote execution of R commands, as well as embedding of an R graphics window.
The rcom package on CRAN provides a (D)COM server in a running R session.
• Another (D)COM server, RDCOMServer, is available from http://www.omegahat.org/. Its
philosophy is discussed in http://www.omegahat.org/RDCOMServer/Docs/Paradigm.html
and is very different from the purpose of this section.

8.2.2 Calling R.dll directly
The R DLL is mainly written in C and has _cdecl entry points. Calling it directly will be tricky
except from C code (or C++ with a little care).
There is a version of the Unix interface calling
int Rf_initEmbeddedR(int ac, char **av);
void Rf_endEmbeddedR(int fatal);
which is an entry point in ‘R.dll’. Examples of its use (and a suitable ‘Makefile.win’) can
be found in the ‘tests/Embedding’ directory of the sources. You may need to ensure that
‘R_HOME /bin’ is in your PATH so the R DLLs are found.
Examples of calling ‘R.dll’ directly are provided in the directory ‘src/gnuwin32/
front-ends’, including a simple command-line front end ‘rtest.c’ whose code is
3
at least on platforms where the values are available, that is having getrlimit and on Linux or having sysctl
supporting KERN_USRSTACK, including FreeBSD and Mac OS X.


#define Win32
#include windows.h
#include stdio.h
#include Rversion.h
#define LibExtern __declspec(dllimport) extern
#include Rembedded.h
#include R_ext/RStartup.h
/* for askok and askyesnocancel */
#include graphapp.h

/* for signal-handling code */
#include psignal.h

/* simple input, simple output */

/* This version blocks all events: a real one needs to call ProcessEvents
frequently. See rterm.c and ../system.c for one approach using
a separate thread for input.
*/
int myReadConsole(const char *prompt, char *buf, int len, int addtohistory)
{
fputs(prompt, stdout);
fflush(stdout);
if(fgets(buf, len, stdin)) return 1; else return 0;
}

void myWriteConsole(const char *buf, int len)
{
printf(%s, buf);
}

void myCallBack(void)
{
/* called during i/o, eval, graphics in ProcessEvents */
}

void myBusy(int which)
{
/* set a busy cursor ... if which = 1, unset if which = 0 */
}

static void my_onintr(int sig) { UserBreak = 1; }

int main (int argc, char **argv)
{
structRstart rp;
Rstart Rp = rp;
char Rversion[25], *RHome;

sprintf(Rversion, %s.%s, R_MAJOR, R_MINOR);
if(strcmp(getDLLVersion(), Rversion) != 0) {
fprintf(stderr, Error: R.DLL version does not matchn);
exit(1);
}

R_setStartTime();
R_DefParams(Rp);
if((RHome = get_R_HOME()) == NULL) {
fprintf(stderr, R_HOME must be set in the environment or Registryn);
exit(1);
}
Rp-rhome = RHome;
Rp-home = getRUser();
Rp-CharacterMode = LinkDLL;
Rp-ReadConsole = myReadConsole;


Rp-WriteConsole = myWriteConsole;
Rp-CallBack = myCallBack;
Rp-ShowMessage = askok;
Rp-YesNoCancel = askyesnocancel;
Rp-Busy = myBusy;

Rp-R_Quiet = TRUE; /* Default is FALSE */
Rp-R_Interactive = FALSE; /* Default is TRUE */
Rp-RestoreAction = SA_RESTORE;
Rp-SaveAction = SA_NOSAVE;
R_SetParams(Rp);
R_set_command_line_arguments(argc, argv);

FlushConsoleInputBuffer(GetStdHandle(STD_INPUT_HANDLE));

signal(SIGBREAK, my_onintr);
GA_initapp(0, 0);
readconsolecfg();
setup_Rmainloop();
#ifdef SIMPLE_CASE
run_Rmainloop();
#else
R_ReplDLLinit();
while(R_ReplDLLdo1() 0) {
/* add user actions here if desired */
}
/* only get here on EOF (not q()) */
#endif
Rf_endEmbeddedR(0);
return 0;
}
The ideas are
• Check that the front-end and the linked ‘R.dll’ match – other front-ends may allow a looser
match.
• Find and set the R home directory and the user’s home directory. The former
may be available from the Windows Registry: it will normally be in HKEY_LOCAL_
MACHINESoftwareR-coreRInstallPath and can be set there by running the program
‘R_HOME binRSetReg.exe’.
• Define startup conditions and callbacks via the Rstart structure. R_DefParams sets the
defaults, and R_SetParams sets updated values.
• Record the command-line arguments used by R_set_command_line_arguments for use by
the R function commandArgs().
• Set up the signal handler and the basic user interface.
• Run the main R loop, possibly with our actions intermeshed.
• Arrange to clean up.
An underlying theme is the need to keep the GUI ‘alive’, and this has not been done in
this example. The R callback R_ProcessEvents needs to be called frequently to ensure that
Windows events in R windows are handled expeditiously. Conversely, R needs to allow the GUI
code (which is running in the same process) to update itself as needed – two ways are provided
to allow this:
• R_ProcessEvents calls the callback registered by Rp-callback. A version of this is used
to run package Tcl/Tk for tcltk under Windows, for the code is
void R_ProcessEvents(void)
{
while (peekevent()) doevent(); /* Windows events for GraphApp */


if (UserBreak) { UserBreak = FALSE; onintr(); }
R_CallBackHook();
if(R_tcldo) R_tcldo();
}
• The mainloop can be split up to allow the calling application to take some action after each
line of input has been dealt with: see the alternative code below #ifdef SIMPLE_CASE.
It may be that no R GraphApp windows need to be considered, although these include
pagers, the windows() graphics device, the R data and script editors and various popups such
as choose.file() and select.list(). It would be possible to replace all of these, but it seems
easier to allow GraphApp to handle most of them.
It is possible to run R in a GUI in a single thread (as ‘RGui.exe’ shows) but it will normally
be easier4 to use multiple threads.
Note that R’s own front ends use a stack size of 10Mb, whereas MinGW executables default
to 2Mb, and Visual C++ ones to 1Mb. The latter stack sizes are too small for a number of R
applications, so general-purpose front-ends should use a larger stack size.

4
An attempt to use only threads in the late 1990s failed to work correctly under Windows 95, the predominant
version of Windows at that time.

Function and variable index 128

Function and variable index

* RdOpts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
*Riconv_open . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 references . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
S3method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
samp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
. section . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
.C . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 seealso . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
.Call . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77, 87 Sexpr . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
.External . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77, 88 source. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
.First.lib . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 sQuote. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
.Fortran . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 strong. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
.Last.lib . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7, 23 tabular . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
.onAttach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 title . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
.onLoad. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 url . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
.onUnload . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 usage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
.Random.seed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 value . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
var . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
verb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

acronym . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 B
alias . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
arguments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 bessel_i . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
author. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 bessel_j . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
bold . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 bessel_k . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
cite . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 bessel_y . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 beta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
command . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 BLAS_LIBS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
concept . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 browser. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
cr . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
deqn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
describe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
44
43
C
description . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Calloc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
details . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 CAR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
dfn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 CDR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
dontrun . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 cgmin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
dontshow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 choose. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
dots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 CITATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8, 32
dQuote. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 cPsort. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
email . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
emph . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 D
enc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
enumerate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 debug . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
env . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 debugger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
eqn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 defineVar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 digamma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
file . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 dump.frames . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
format. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 duplicate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
if . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 dyn.load . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
ifelse. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 dyn.unload . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
itemize . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
kbd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
keyword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
E
ldots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 exp_rand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
link . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 expm1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
method. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 export . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
name . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 exportClasses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
note . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 exportMethods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
option. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 exportPattern . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
out . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
pkg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
preformatted . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 F
R . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 FALSE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108


findInterval . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 O
findVar. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 OBJECTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13, 73
FLIBS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
fmax2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
fmin2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 P
fprec . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
pentagamma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
Free . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
PKG_CFLAGS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
fround. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
PKG_CPPFLAGS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
fsign . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
PKG_CXXFLAGS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
ftrunc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
PKG_FCFLAGS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
PKG_FFLAGS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
G PKG_LIBS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
PKG_OBJCFLAGS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
gammafn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
prompt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
gctorture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
PROTECT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
getAttrib . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
PROTECT_WITH_INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
getCharCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
psigamma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
GetRNGstate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
PutRNGstate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
pythag. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
H
hsv2rgb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Q
qsort3. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
I qsort4. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
imax2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
imin2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 R
import . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
importClassesFrom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 R CMD build . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
importFrom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 R CMD check . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
importMethodsFrom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 R CMD config . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
install. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 R CMD Rd2dvi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
iPsort. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 R CMD Rdconv . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
ISNA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90, 103 R CMD Sd2Rd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
ISNAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90, 103 R CMD SHLIB . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
R CMD Stangle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
R CMD Sweave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
L R_addhistory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
R_alloc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
LAPACK_LIBS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
R_Busy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
lbeta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
R_ChooseFile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
lbfgsb. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
R_CleanUp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122
lchoose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
R_ClearErrConsole . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
lgamma1p . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
R_csort . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
lgammafn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
R_EditFile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
library.dynam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7, 69
R_ExpandFileName . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
log1p . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
R_FINITE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
log1pmx . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
R_FlushConsole . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
logspace_add . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
R_GetCCallable . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
logspace_sub . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
R_INLINE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
R_IsNaN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
R_isort . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
M R_LIBRARY_DIR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
M_E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 R_loadhistory. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
M_PI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 R_max_col . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
mkChar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 R_NegInf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
mkCharCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 R_PACKAGE_DIR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
mkCharLen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 R_ParseVector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
mkCharLenCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 R_PosInf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
R_pow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
R_pow_di . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
N R_qsort . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
NA_REAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 R_qsort_I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
nmmin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 R_qsort_int . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
norm_rand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 R_qsort_int_I. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110


R_ReadConsole. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 S3method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
R_RegisterCCallable . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 SAFE_FFLAGS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
R_registerRoutines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 samin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
R_ResetConsole . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 seed_in . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
R_rsort . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 seed_out . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
R_savehistory. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 setAttrib . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
R_ShowFiles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 setVar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
R_ShowMessage. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 sign . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
R_Suicide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 summaryRprof . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
R_tmpnam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
R_Version . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 system.time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
R_WriteConsole . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
R_WriteConsoleEx . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
rcont2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 T
Rdqagi. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 tetragamma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
Rdqags. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 trace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
Realloc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 traceback . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
recover. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 tracemem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
reEnc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 translateChar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
REprintf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 translateCharUTF8 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
REPROTECT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 trigamma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
REvprintf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 TRUE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
revsort . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
rgb2hsv . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
Riconv. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 U
Riconv_close . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 undebug. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
Rprintf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 unif_rand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
Rprof . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51, 53 UNPROTECT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Rprofmem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 UNPROTECT_PTR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
rPsort. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 untracemem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
rsort_with_index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 useDynLib . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Rvprintf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

V
S vmaxget . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
S_alloc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 vmaxset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
S_realloc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 vmmin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108

Concept index 131

Concept index

Generic functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
linkS4class . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
H
A handling character data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
Allocating storage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Handling lists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
Attributes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 Handling R objects in C. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77

B I
Bessel functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 IEEE special values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90, 103
Beta function . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 INDEX file . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Building packages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Indices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Inspecting R objects when debugging . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
integration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
C Interfaces to compiled code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67, 87
C++ code, interfacing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Interfacing C++ code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Calling C from FORTRAN and vice versa . . . . . . . 103 Interrupts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
Checking packages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
citation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8, 32
Classes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 L
cleanup file . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 LICENCE file . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
conditionals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 LICENSE file . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
configure file . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Lists and tables in documentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
COPYING file . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Copying objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
CRAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 M
CRAN submission. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Creating packages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Marking text in documentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
Creating shared objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 Mathematics in documentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
Cross-references in documentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Memory allocation from C . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
cumulative hazard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Memory use. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Method functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116
Missing values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90, 103
D
Debugging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
DESCRIPTION file . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 N
Details of R types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 name spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Distribution functions from C . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 Numerical analysis subroutines from C . . . . . . . . . . 104
Documentation, writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Numerical derivatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Dynamic loading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
dynamic pages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
O
Operating system access. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
E optimization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
encoding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
Error handling from C . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
Error handling from FORTRAN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 P
Evaluating R expressions from C . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 Package builder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
external pointer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Package bundles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Package structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Package subdirectories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
F Packages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
finalizer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Parsing R code from C . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
Finding variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 Platform-specific documentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Printing from C . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
Printing from FORTRAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
G Processing Rd format . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
Gamma function . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 Profiling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51, 53, 54
Garbage collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

Concept index 132

R V
Random numbers in C . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102, 105 Version information from C . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
Random numbers in FORTRAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
vignettes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Registering native routines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
Visibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113

S
Setting variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 W
Sort functions from C . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
Submitting to CRAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 weak reference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
Sweave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

T Z
Tidying R code . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 Zero-finding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

R Exts

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