In R semantics, objects are copied by value. This means that
modifying the copy leaves the original object intact. Since,
copying data in memory is an expensive operation, copies in R are
as lazy as possible. They only happen when the new object is
actually modified. However, some operations (like node_poke_car()
or node_poke_cdr()) do not support copy-on-write. In those cases,
it is necessary to duplicate the object manually in order to
preserve copy-by-value semantics.
duplicate(x, shallow = FALSE)Any R object. However, uncopyable types like symbols and
environments are returned as is (just like with <-).
This is relevant for recursive data structures like lists, calls and pairlists. A shallow copy only duplicates the top-level data structure. The objects contained in the list are still the same.
Some objects are not duplicable, like symbols and environments.
duplicate() returns its input for these unique objects.
pairlist