base (version 3.3)

Primitive: Look Up a Primitive Function

Description

.Primitive looks up by name a ‘primitive’ (internally implemented) function.

Usage

.Primitive(name)

Arguments

name

name of the R function.

Details

The advantage of .Primitive over .Internal functions is the potential efficiency of argument passing, and that positional matching can be used where desirable, e.g.\ifelse{latex}{\out{~}}{ } in switch. For more details, see the ‘R Internals Manual’.

All primitive functions are in the base namespace.

This function is almost never used: `name` or, more carefully, get(name, envir = baseenv()) work equally well and do not depend on knowing which functions are primitive (which does change as R evolves).

See Also

.Internal.

Examples

mysqrt <- .Primitive("sqrt")
c
.Internal # this one *must* be primitive!
`if` # need backticks