Tuesday 7 September 2010

A queue in R

Recently someone asked on the R-help mailing list if there was an implementation of a queue in R. I had a quick look (which the poster should have done anyway) and all I could find was an implementation in the filehash package that used database file storage.

I figured it couldn't be that hard to implement just by sticking things on one end of a list and taking them off the other, so I wrote one between having breakfast and setting off late for work.

This evening I polished it off a bit, and even added logging so you could see how big your queue had grown.

The code is available for download under a CC license from my Maths and Stats web pages.

If anyone wants to add this to a package or make a package of it, let me know and I'll help you write a stack and a deque too.