Functional Data Structures in R: Advanced Statistical Programming in R

© Thomas Mailund 2017

Thomas Mailund, Functional Data Structures in R, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-3144-9_1

1. Introduction

Thomas Mailund¹ 

(1)Aarhus N, Denmark

This book gives an introduction to functional data structures. Many traditional data structures rely on the structures being mutable. We can update search trees, change links in linked lists, and rearrange values in a vector. In functional languages, and as a general rule in the R programming language, data is not mutable. You cannot alter existing data. The techniques used to modify data structures to give us efficient building blocks for algorithmic programming cannot be used.

There are workarounds for this. R is not a pure functional language, and we can change variable-value bindings ...