Look Up a Primitive Function

Description

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

Usage

.Primitive(name)

Arguments

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. 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

is.primitive showing that primitive functions come in two types (typeof), .Internal.

Examples

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