What is the purpose of environments in R and when I need to use more than one?

Question

This is a basic R question: R has the concept of environment. So what purpose does it have, when do I need to start more then one and how do I switch between them? What is the advantage of multiple environments (other then looking up content of .Rdata file)?

Answer 1

The idea of environments is important and you use them all the time, mostly without realizing it. If you are just using R and not doing anything fancy then the indirect use of environments is all that you need and you will not need to explicitly create and manipulate environments. Only when you get into more advanced usage will you need to understand more. The main place that you use (indirectly) environments is that every function has its own environment, so every time you run a function you are using new envirnments. Why this is important is because this means that if the function uses a variable named "x" and you have a variable named "x" then the computer can keep them straight and use the correct one when it needs to and your copy of "x" does not get over written by the functions version.

Some other cases where you might use environments: Each package has its own environment so 2 packages can both be loaded with the same name of an internal function and they won't interfere with each other. You can keep your workspace a little cleaner by attaching a new enironment and loading function definitions into that environment rather than the global or working environment. When you write your own functions and you want to share variables between functions then you will need to understand about environments. Environmets can be used to emulate pass-by-reference instead of pass-by-value if you are ever in a situation where that matters (if you don't recognize those phrases then it probably does not matter).

Answer 2

You can think of environments as unordered lists. Both datatypes offer something like the hash table data structure to the user, i.e., a mapping from names to values. The lack of ordering in environments offers better performance when compared with lists on similar tasks.

The access functions [[ and $ work for both.

A nice fact about environments which is not true for lists is that environments pass by reference when supplied as function arguments, offering a way to improve performance when working large objects.

Answer 3

Personally, I never work directly with environments. Instead, I divide my scripts up in functions. This leads to an increased reusability, and to more structure. In addition, each function runs in its own environment, ensuring minimum interference in variables etc.