18  R Environments

18.1 Environment features

R objects and address location

• The job of an environment is to associate, or bind, a set of names to a set of values.

• An environment may be considered as a bag of names

• Each name points to an object stored elsewhere in memory

• The objects do not live in the environment; so multiple names can point to the same object. They can also point to different objects that have the same value.

• Every name in an environment is unique.

• The names in an environment are not ordered.

• An environment has a parent.

• There are four special environments:

  • The globalenv(), or global environment, is the interactive workspace. This is the environment in which you normally work. The parent of the global environment is the last package that you attached with library() or require().

  • The baseenv(), or base environment, is the environment of the base package. Its parent is the empty environment.

  • The emptyenv(), or empty environment, is the ultimate ancestor of all environments, and the only environment without a parent.

  • The environment() is the current environment.

18.2 All Environments

R Environment