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by hadley 3777 days ago
The lack of data structures in R is a totally fixable problem.
1 comments

Sure, through packages, but you'd need to adapt the entire standard library to take advantage of them, so you could pass new data structures to built-in functions and get meaningful results.

Generic iterators would also be extremely useful to build in, so it's easy to work with a wide variety of structures.

And generic functions allow you to fill in those missing pieces from a package too.