R: Call a “Primitive” Internal Function

Primitive {base} | R Documentation

## Call a “Primitive” Internal Function

### Description

`.Primitive` returns an entry point to a ‘primitive’ (internally implemented) function.

### Usage

    .Primitive(name)

### Arguments

`name` | name of the R function.

### Details

The advantage of `.Primitive` over `.Internal` functions is the potential efficiency of argument passing. However, this is done by ignoring argument names and using positional matching of arguments (unless arranged differently for specific primitives such as `rep`), so this is discouraged for functions of more than one argument.

All primitive functions are in the base name space.

### See Also

`.Internal`.

### Examples

    mysqrt <- .Primitive("sqrt")
    c
    .Internal # this one *must* be primitive!
    get("if") # just 'if' or 'print(if)' are not syntactically ok.

[Package base version 2.8.1 Index]