CAR
and CDR
are how you access pairlist objects, as explained in section 2.1.11 of R Language Definition. CAR
contains the first element, and CDR
contains the remaining elements. An example is given in section 5.10.2 of Writing R Extensions:
#include <R.h>
#include <Rinternals.h>
SEXP convolveE(SEXP args)
{
int i, j, na, nb, nab;
double *xa, *xb, *xab;
SEXP a, b, ab;
a = PROTECT(coerceVector(CADR(args), REALSXP));
b = PROTECT(coerceVector(CADDR(args), REALSXP));
...
}
/* 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);
There's also a TAG
macro to access the names given to the actual arguments.
checkArity
ensures that the number of arguments passed to the function is correct. args
are the actual arguments passed to the function. op
is offset pointer "used for C functions that deal with more than one R function" (quoted from src/main/names.c
, which also contains the table showing the offset and arity for each function).
For example, do_colsum
handles col/rowSums
and col/rowMeans
.
/* Table of .Internal(.) and .Primitive(.) R functions
* ===== ========= ==========
* Each entry is a line with
*
* printname c-entry offset eval arity pp-kind precedence rightassoc
* --------- ------- ------ ---- ----- ------- ---------- ----------
{"colSums", do_colsum, 0, 11, 4, {PP_FUNCALL, PREC_FN, 0}},
{"colMeans", do_colsum, 1, 11, 4, {PP_FUNCALL, PREC_FN, 0}},
{"rowSums", do_colsum, 2, 11, 4, {PP_FUNCALL, PREC_FN, 0}},
{"rowMeans", do_colsum, 3, 11, 4, {PP_FUNCALL, PREC_FN, 0}},
Note that arity
in the above table is 4 because (even though rowSums
et al only have 3 arguments) do_colsum
has 4, which you can see from the .Internal
call in rowSums
:
> rowSums
function (x, na.rm = FALSE, dims = 1L)
{
if (is.data.frame(x))
x <- as.matrix(x)
if (!is.array(x) || length(dn <- dim(x)) < 2L)
stop("'x' must be an array of at least two dimensions")
if (dims < 1L || dims > length(dn) - 1L)
stop("invalid 'dims'")
p <- prod(dn[-(1L:dims)])
dn <- dn[1L:dims]
z <- if (is.complex(x))
.Internal(rowSums(Re(x), prod(dn), p, na.rm)) + (0+1i) *
.Internal(rowSums(Im(x), prod(dn), p, na.rm))
else .Internal(rowSums(x, prod(dn), p, na.rm))
if (length(dn) > 1L) {
dim(z) <- dn
dimnames(z) <- dimnames(x)[1L:dims]
}
else names(z) <- dimnames(x)[[1L]]
z
}