noko

I just wanted to comment on inefficiency in the R language. I had a simple table from a file, and I was accessing columns using $ many times in a loop i.e. table$column
http://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-patched/library/base/html/Extract.html

The result was that the program ran prohibitively slow,100x slowdown for simple tasks. In hindsight this might be expected, since it was doing a lookup on the column name, but i didn't yet know how to profile code 'the R way', so i didn't know what was wrong and i was butthurt and sad.
fuck me

String-based lookups are always slow.