I've been doing some work with some large, complex lists lately and I've seen some behaviour which was surprising (to me, at least), mainly to do with assigning names to a list. A simple example:
Fil <- list(
a = list(A=seq(1, 5, 1), B=rnorm(5), C=runif(5)),
b = list(A="Cat", B=c("Dog", "Bird"), C=list("Squirrel", "Cheetah", "Lion")),
c = list(A=rep(TRUE, 5), B=rep(FALSE, 5), C=rep(NA, 5)))
filList <- list()
for(i in 1:3){
filList[i] <- Fil[i]
names(filList)[i] <- names(Fil[i])
}
identical(Fil,filList)
[1] TRUE
but:
for(i in 1:3){
filList[i] <- Fil[i]
names(filList[i]) <- names(Fil[i])
}
identical(Fil,filList)
[1] FALSE
I think the main reason it confuses me is because the form of the left-hand side of first names
line in the first for loop needs to be different from that of the right-hand side to work; I would have thought that these should be the same. Could anybody please explain this to me?