[Rd] How deep can/should lists be nested?

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On 14/10/2012 12:53, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> On 12-10-14 7:06 AM, Richard Cotton wrote:
>> I started idly wondering how deeply lists could be nested, and
>> couldn't find an explicit limit in the documentation.  With this
>> simple test
>>
>> a_list <- list()
>> count <- 0
>> repeat
>> {
>>    a_list[[1]] <- a_list
>>    count <- count + 1
>> }
>>
>> my (Win7, R-2.16.0 devel) machine threw an error when count got close
>> to 25000.
>>
>> The error that stopped it was
>>
>> Error: protect(): protection stack overflow
>>
>> I don't know how easy it would be to stop such an error occuring, and
>> it probably isn't that useful to be able to nest lists any further.  I
>> do think it might be useful for users to be able to know how deeply
>> they can nest lists though.
>>
>> Perhaps it would be better to limit nesting to the value of
>> getOption("expressions").  Does anyone have any strong feelings on
>> what the correct behaviour should be?
>
> There should be no limit other than memory.  That overflow you saw is a
> bug.  Not sure it's worth fixing, since 25000 is far beyond any sensible
> nesting level, but I'll take a look.

I'm not so sure it is a bug.  There have to be limits other than the 
total amount of memory (the C stack size is another one): one was 
reached and the computation was stopped cleanly.  We even allow the size 
of the ppstack to be changed in the extremely rare cases where this 
might matter.

But the real point is that that limit is not on the nesting of lists but 
on that particular way to create a deeply nested list.  We know that 
some code to copy lists is sub-optimal, but we've not been shown a 
real-world example where it mattered enough to prioritize looking into.

>
> Duncan Murdoch


-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
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